Top NHL Defensemen by Decade

Earlier this summer I saw Bard on the Beach's production of Antigone. It was very good, with one quirk. The language was mostly respectable modern pseudo-epic: while not authentic it tried to sound ancient and tragic, except for when it didn't. Antigone would have some poignant speech, and Creon would look at her and say "are you fucking kidding me?", and the crowd would laugh and my brain would shift from fifth to second without a clutch and leave a stream of engine parts and motor oil on the highway of dramatic appreciation.

The NHL's defensemen in the 1960s were a lot like that.

It was the last decade of the Classical Tragic Defenseman. Tim Horton. Doug Harvey. Allan Stanley. Red Kelly. Marcel Pronovost. They were excellent players, too excellent to make one type—Pronovost was almost, but not quite, modern—but part of an extended family. Most of them only kinda skate, most of them could drink, those who couldn't drink thought they could, they all had some just obscene weakness. Horton, maybe the best defenseman of the decade, couldn't see. Harvey, whose best decade was the '50s but was still good in the '60s, was an actual alcoholic, not merely a hard-drinking hockey player. Pronovost's body was made up of so much scar tissue that he couldn't move. Yet the league's standard of defense was such that not only did they all play until they were a billion years old but they played well. The 1967 Maple Leafs were called the "Over the Hill Gang" because Lester Pearson may have passed the Canada Pension Plan as a subsidy for their blue line. And you probably remember how the 1967 Maple Leafs did. It wasn't just that these guys were incredibly old, it's that it was good to be incredibly old.

Then, right at the end of the decade, you see Bobby Orr and Brad Park, who changed everything, standing out in history like an F-bomb in the middle of Sophocles. Well, actually, to be more strictly accurate, you have Pierre Pilote, who perhaps was to Orr what Sophocles was to Shakespeare, the man who seemed like a one-off until he wasn't.

The 1970s was hockey's coolest decade. Sudden expansion, new types of player, the arrival of the Europeans, more fighting, great dynasties, great hair, first-time winners, the World Hockey Association. Bobby Orr, Guy Lafleur, Bobby Clarke, Ken Dryden, Paul Henderson. Glorious brawls, glorious goals, drama off the ice and on. The 1970s hold together, as a decade, in the way few others do, with expansion on one end and the post-WHA Gretzky era on the other. The 1970s are their own thing.

Ahead of the scoring explosion of the 1980s, it was an era unusually gifted with great defensemen. Orr, of course; the greatest of them all, the player who half a century later has not even been approached, whose greatness only grows with time, the player who changed the way defensemen could play but also set a standard none of his gifted successors have approached. But there was Brad Park and Denis Potvin and Larry Robinson, there was the start for Ray Bourque and the end for J. C. Tremblay, there was Börje Salming revolutionizing the game in an entirely different way. Though not a low-scoring era, the 1970s may have been the decade of the blueliner. There were plenty of great defensemen between Eddie Shore and Bobby Orr, of course, but people had forgotten that the first person to touch the puck has every opportunity to be as creative as the last. The influence of European hockey was just arriving, and hadn't had time to influence young players, but the game had already changed, and the ability of the defense to control where the puck went beyond throwing a thundering open-ice hit was being developed and appreciated in new ways.

So let's look at the best NHL defensemen of the 1970s. Not so much the very best, because nobody needs to be told that Bobby Orr or Larry Robinson was good, but the second tier, the guys who just made the Hall of Fame or didn't quite, the mass of elite talent who, in an elite era, influenced the game.