How Good Was the WHA: The Subjective Factor

There were two players who scored a five: Bobby Hull and Mark Howe. When talking about the top players, there are the old, who came out of the NHL as stars when they entered the WHA, and the young, who came out of the WHA to become NHL stars¹. Bobby Hull was a great NHL star when he went into the WHA; he had just put up a 50-goal season when that meant something and was the best sniper alive. Mark Howe was a great NHL star when he came out of the WHA, without Bobby’s (or his dad’s) trademark skills but an unbelievably effective all-rounder. Bobby played 411 WHA games, Mark played 426. The best Hull and the second-best Howe were WHA players, whose WHA careers were immediately adjacent to their NHL superstardom. Both Bobby and Mark were probably even better in the NHL than they were in the WHA, Bobby because of Father Time and Mark because the NHL called a bit more out of him, but as superstars ought to be, they were excellent on both circuits for years. No doubt about either, that’s what makes them fives.

Of course Wayne Gretzky would have been a five but he didn’t play 150 WHA games; he’s exactly the sort of player who we’re trying to exclude, the one who was a WHAer more by a fluke of history than because he was a core part of the league. Wayne Gretzky was a magnificent hockey player^{[citation needed]} but saying Gretzky’s NHL excellence after 80 WHA games strengthens the WHA’s major-league credentials is too much like saying Gretzky’s 66 OHA games mean the OHA was a major league. The same with Mike Gartner, with Michel Goulet, with Ken Linseman, all those young players you’re expecting to see in this article and will not, because they only played one season in the WHA. Jari Kurri played one WHA game. What does that mean for the WHA as a major league? Nothing. We’re not interested in salting our claim with these beautiful nuggets; we want to see how much gold the WHA really had, day-to-day.

There were seventeen players who scored a four, for this is a broad category of past-their-prime Hall of Famers and the Hall of Very Good. In order of career WHA games played, those were: John “Pie” McKenzie, J. C. Tremblay, Gordie Howe, Mike Rogers, Pat Stapleton, Réal Cloutier, Paul Henderson, John Garrett, Richard Brodeur, Ralph Backstrom, Dave Keon, Dave Dryden, Frank Mahovlich, Morris Lukowich, Blaine Stoughton, Gerry Cheevers, and Kent Nilsson. Most of those guys were old NHL stars entering the WHA on their way down, but they were coming off good seasons, including All-Star games. People sleep on Paul Henderson, because everyone knows he was only great in 1972, and when he joined the Toronto Toros he was 32 years old; however, he made his two NHL All-Star Games when he was 29 and 30, and the season before joining the WHA was at worst the Leafs’ third-best player behind Sittler and Salming. Henderson was a legit late bloomer. Gordie was one of the two greatest players who ever lived, and had never had a bad NHL season, but he had been retired for two full years when he signed with the Houston Aeros. Keon was a five at his best but was well past that when he joined the WHA. Tremblay and Mahovlich were both 4.49s or thereabouts. Pat, Pie, Paul, and ralPh Backstrom were solid longtime two-way players who could and did keep going about as long as they wanted. Dave Dryden was an unusually good but otherwise typical inconsistent ’70s goalie. Several of these old guys actually hung around long enough to come out the other end and play in the NHL afterthe merger. Keon was the best of the bunch, serviceable for about a season and a half into his old age.

None of the players who had WHA careers before becoming NHL 4s were as good as Gordie, Tremblay, or Keon, but hitting the NHL of the 1980s was to hit a meat-grinder that turned players into ex-players like no other era, and the reason they got a 4 was because they showed they could play. Mike Rogers, no more than a pretty good WHA player for five seasons, went to Hartford and had three 100-point seasons on the trot. Réal Cloutier was better in the WHA than the NHL because of injuries but still appeared in the All-Star Game and was undeniably very good. John Garrett probably should have been a three but had just died when I did this list and he did play in an All-Star Game. Richard Brodeur, who did not play in an All-Star Game but was a quality starter for six NHL seasons, is a first-ballot 3.5. Morris Lukowich played three WHA seasons at the start of his career and went on to four NHL 30-goal seasons and a couple All-Star Games. Blaine Stoughton tied for the NHL lead in goals in the first season after the merger. Gerry Cheevers was good both before and after he played in the WHA. Finally, Kent Nilsson snuck onto this list by playing 156 WHA games (214 points) and had a few seasons of considerable NHL success with the Flames.

Interestingly, most of those younger 4s were undersized forwards. Lukowich and Rogers were 5’9″, Cloutier was 5’10”, Stoughton was 5’11”; Kent Nilsson was the heavyweight at 6’1″. Even the goalies, Garrett and Brodeur, were little. A few of the “old 4″s were defensemen (Tremblay and Stapleton) but none of the “young 4s”. I do think this says something about the type of player the WHA attracted, as well as why they showed NHL excellence but didn’t stick for the long haul. They were, however, legitimate stars, for a while.

Placing this in context, how many players in the NHL could have been called “4”s in 1978–79? I haven’t counted, but you gotta figure… 50 or so? More than eighteen. However, you would expect some players with a “4’s skills” to show up as lower numbers because they were playing their prime years in the WHA rather than the NHL, and eighteen is more than good enough to show the WHA was a league with NHL-standard stars.

42 players scored a three, which is too many to list. This includes André Lacroix, the WHA’s all-time scoring leader. It includes Marc Tardif, who may have been the most talented WHA scorer to never have much of an NHL career thanks to concussions. It includes the other two-thirds of the Hot Line, Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg. It includes two Hockey Hall of Famers, Václav Nedomanský and Harry Howell, neither of whom are in the Hall for WHA-related reasons. The typical “3” is either a guy whose prime years were clearly in the WHA, like Lacroix, Paul Shmyr, or Barry Long, or guys who were either old or young and were never great but had staying power, like Ted Green on the old side and John Tonelli on the young side. There were some hard-luck cases of players who should have been better than they were, like Nilsson and Hedberg, and a whole bunch of solid, contributing pros whose careers included a WHA stop for two or three seasons. There were a few NHL players like Bob Woytowich who had pretty good NHL careers (Woytowich was an All-Star in 1970) but fell apart in the WHA and stuck around more through optimism than logic, and a few WHA players like Pat Hickey who were no more than useful in the WHA but established long, if not sterling, NHL careers.

That’s 61 out of 285 WHA regulars who were, clearly, in the “credit” column for their NHL careers: a three or better is a player you want. Afterwards it gets kinda borderline.

52 players scored a two. Most of them were not very good, though a few names stand out as players who probably would have clicked in the NHL eventually and happened to do it in the WHA instead. Danny Lawson, for example, managed ten goals and 16 points on 176 shots in his last NHL season as a 24-year-old, and God knows how, before moving to the WHA and becoming an effective mucky scorer. Tom Webster was a Calder finalist before he jumped to the WHA, and broke down before the merger; he had better skills than a 2 but a 2 is what he was. Jim Harrison wasn’t actually that good but did have a ten-point game, Brent Hughes was good, several of these guys were pretty good, but most of them were sort of there, cashing (hopefully) their paychecks twice a month, skating up and down the ice and doing their job. Marty Howe was a two.

94 players scored a one, and as you’d expect the rule for these players are relative mediocrities who just hung around the WHA for a while. Certainly there are some special cases, players affected by injury in the NHL, players who had 380 WHA points but could have had 275 NHL points in a different lifetime. Lars-Erik Sjöberg was a one, because he played one just awful NHL season, but he was obviously a better player than that. SUCS is not particularly a measure of player excellence, but a measure of how well any excellence happened to translate to the NHL. An obviously excellent player who couldn’t get it done in the NHL for some reason, like Sjöberg, scores low. Had Derek Sanderson got into 150 WHA games, he would have been a 4 even though his WHA career was infamously “pay him to go away” bad, but because the Sandersons, who flat-out wash out of the WHA, tend not to have played 150 games, this list should bias a bit low.

78 players scored a zero, meaning they never played an NHL game. Why are there more ones than zeroes? Because the “minimum 150 WHA games” qualification cuts out the legion of zeroes who just weren’t good enough to hang around in any league. If the WHA had a billion zeroes kicking around its regulars, it would be a bad sign.

Were any of the zeroes very good? Not really. Zero is a small number. Some of the ones with long WHA careers, like Rusty Patenaude, Larry Lund, Gavin Kirk, and John Gray, were useful for a number of seasons. There are a few ruffians with better-than-average hockey skills for their role, like Steve Sutherland and Jim Cardiff. I am prepared to say there was not a real “diamond in the rough.” Larry Lund is the nearest thing: the leading scorer among the zeroes with 426 points in 459 WHA games, Lund came out of the Edmonton Oil Kings to have a 10-year minor league career, mostly in the WHL, not showing much reason to think he should be anywhere else until at ages 30 and 31 he had two 90-point seasons with an excellent Phoenix Roadrunners team. Going to the WHA from there, Lund spent six seasons with the Houston Aeros, winning two WHA championships, having a 100-point season, and being a solid, useful, surprisingly old second-line-type guy on a team that had more old players than it always knew what to do with. When Gordie Howe left Houston for 1977–78 the Aeros brought back 43-year-old Keke Mortson hoping that nobody would notice how old Lund was, but alas everybody did; the Aeros had a good year but Lund did not, and he retired at the end of the season.

How do the NHL futures of the WHA regulars compare to the major league baseball futures of the Union Association’s players, the players that Bill James thought obviously not good enough to call the UA “major league baseball?” We can’t map it one-to-one, because the author of this post is not Bill James^{[citation needed]}. James needed to make distinctions between old, washed up ex-pros and players who were really prospects, and otherwise-competent major leaguers; since the WHA lasted seven seasons rather than one, I found it more helpful not to make that distinction. On the other hand, I had to divide my stars between “ordinary stars” and the true superstars, and that question did not arise for the UA.

James records every player who ever got on the field in the UA, 272 of them, which is a pleasingly close number to our 285 WHA players who got into 150 games or more. What this means is that James’s list must include some players who you wouldn’t call “major-league players” even if you called the Union Association a major league: happening to play half an inning in left field does not make you a real big-leaguer anywhere except the bar. That does not apply to the WHA when you cut the line off at 150 games: if the WHA is a legitimate major league than a 300GP SUCS 0 player will probably have been a legitimate major-leaguer, if a mediocre one.

James divides the Union Association players into “no other major league connection” (0 SUCS), “had brief trials but failed” (1 SUCS), “major league fringe players” (2 SUCS), “overaged and inexperienced players” and “legitimate major league players” (3 SUCS; remember that if a player was too old/young and therefore crappy in the NHL, we rate his SUCS according to what he was at the time, not had been or would become), “legitimate major league players” (also 3 SUCS), and “major league stars” (which includes 4 SUCS and 5 SUCS WHA players, the division of whom would be a problem if James thought the Union Association had any)². Here is a comparison.

The Union Association and the World Hockey Association compare very closely in the “mushy middle,” the 2 SUCS, 3 SUCS players, the players who were either indisputable major leaguers or fairly clear ones, but didn’t win you any pennants by themselves.

The differences are: first, the Union Association had vastly more 0 SUCS players, which you would expect measuring the entire history of the UA against the 150GP+ players of the WHA. Every cup-of-Shoeless-Joe shows up on the sad end of the UA list, but not the WHA’s, and the WHA’s plugs were definitely very pluggy³. Against this, the WHA lasted seven seasons. A 0 SUCS player in the WHA, as we’ve seen, could still have had a real career; a 0 SUCS-equivalent in the Union Association definitely could not. However, had we measured every one of the 899 men who ever played a WHA game, we would have wound up with a whole lot more zeroes but also one more five and a few more threes. Call it indecisive: the nature of the measurement giveth, and it taketh away⁴.

Second, the World Hockey Association had star major leaguers. The closest thing to a “major league star” the Union Association boasted was pitcher Charlie Sweeney⁵. Sweeney, excluding the UA, pitched in 96 major league games. He was well-known for striking out 19 in a game immediately before joining the UA but that was against a major league career strikeouts per nine innings that, if you exclude the UA, was below 4.0. He was done after 1887. Sweeney was also a competent enough batter to get 894 at-bats and 224 hits, fielding sometimes to get his bat in the lineup, though as a batter Sweeney was “unusually not bad” rather than “good” (except in the UA, where he was 1.6 WAR as a batter and cracked .300). If I put a SUCS on Sweeney, accepting that I know a great deal less about 1880s baseball than 1970s hockey, I’d lean towards a 2 or a 3. One star game does not a star player make (see, again, Jim Harrison).

There was no equivalent to Bobby Hull, who was one of the best players in hockey the year he joined the WHA, or Mark Howe, who was one of the best players in hockey the year he joined the NHL from the WHA. There were no equivalents to the fine old veterans who were obvious NHL stars and wound down in the WHA, there were no Mike Rogers or Blair MacDonalds who burst out for a couple years on the league leaderboards. If you view the lineup depth, the comparison between the UA and the WHA is closer than you’d like, but nineteen stars is a hugely different thing from zero stars. It’s impossible to say how huge a difference it is. It is, probably, the difference between major-league and not.

Looking at what WHA regulars did in the NHL, en masse, does not make a strong case for the WHA as major league hockey. But it doesn’t overturn the case, either, and it reminds us that the WHA had a real, definable amount of objective star players, in a way that might define major league sport.

1. There’s secretly a third category, but it’s “Gerry Cheevers.”
2. Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Free Press, 2003), 21–34.
3. Excluding 18 Finnish selects (including Jari Kurri) who played one WHA regular season game against the Edmonton Oilers in 1979, and a few Soviets/Czechoslovaks in a similar boat, 64 players played in one to three WHA games. 53 (82.8%) played 0 NHL games (SUCS 0). The exceptions are mostly SUCS 1 goalies who got an NHL game somewhere, went to the minors for years, and then got a WHA game somewhere else, followed by skaters who got multiple cups of coffee on bad teams, never sticking. Precisely two of those 64 were in any way real big-leaguers: Morris Mott played 199 NHL games for California then spent a year in the minors before playing twice with the 1976–77 Winnipeg Jets (SUCS 1; Bill James may have called him the equvalent of a SUCS 2). Gerry Meehan, a quality NHL player, got in 2 games with the Cincinnati Stingers as his career ended (SUCS 3; there’s a whole lot more on him if you want it).
4. Speed rating of some of the more famous WHA-to-NHL “rookies”: Wayne Gretzky 5, Mike Gartner 3, Michel Goulet 3, Craig Hartsburg 3, Rob Ramage 3, Rick Vaive 3, Gaston Gingras 2, Dave Hunter 2, Rod Langway 2, Ken Linseman 2, Mark Messier 2, Pat Price 1. This is taking an extremely, deliberately short-term view, almost exclusively asking how they contributed in their first NHL seasons, in light of the fact that they were all 19- or 20-year-old prospects. Not a lot of these players took a visible “step back” from the WHA to the NHL, they were mostly kids who were useful prospects in the WHA, useful prospects their first year in the NHL, then took off. Messier, Hartsburg, Ramage, Vaive, and Gretzky were clearly better NHL “rookies” than WHA rookies; only Gingras, Linseman, and Price had obvious off years and they got better.
5. James, 30.