Statistical history

The Great NHL Defensemen of the 1960s

August 12, 2026 Statistical history, Top NHL Defensemen by Decade 3,308 words

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.

August 12, 2026 Statistical history, Top NHL Defensemen by Decade 3,308 words

The Crushing Futility of the Philadelphia Quakers

August 5, 2026 Statistical history 2,434 words

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania got its first NHL team in the 1930–31 season. The Pittsburgh Pirates, in this context a previously-successful hockey team, moved across the Allegheny Mountains at the instigation of owner Benny Leonard, the legendary lightweight boxing champion who was a Jewish kid from New York but had fought many of his most famous bouts in the City of Brotherly Love. Granted, the Pittsburgh Pirates in their last season had been a terrible hockey team, with a record of 5-36-3, nine wins below the next-worst team in the NHL, but they had picked up 19-year-old future Hockey Hall of Famer Syd Howe, useful young forward Wally Kilrea, and heavyweight defenseman Allan "Big Pete" Shields from Ottawa in the offseason, so in Philadelphia the newly-christened Quakers were hardly going to be worse.

With their tiger-stripe sleeves and attractive cursive chest logo, the Quakers actually seem to have looked rather sharp. Everything was black and white in the 1930s so maybe they were ghastly in person but the surviving photos show a timeless quality that could walk into a Heritage Classic and sell 20,000 sweaters today. They had a few neat players: besides Howe, a young, tough little forward named Gerry Lowrey could chip in points, Kilrea wasn't in Howe's class but went on to 316 NHL games in an era where that meant something, Shields and Johnny McKinnon gave established defense, skipper Hib Milks wasn't bad, and rookie starting goalie Wilf Cude was only 20 when the season started but became solid with the pre-war Canadiens. And Philadelphia was a hockey city: their Can-Am team, the Philadelphia Arrows, drew 4,000 or so fans a night to the Philadelphia Arena.

This is all a rather feeble look at the bright side, for the Philadelphia Quakers were in fact completely doomed. Benny Leonard was only the official owner; the real man was bootlegger "Big Bill" Dwyer, who besides his unsavory reputation was also the owner of the New York Americans and therefore could not be officially involved with the Quakers. They had no stars and their few NHL-level talents were either too old or too young. Off the ice, the Philadelphia Arena was a 5,000-seat barn unsuitable for major league hockey in a declining neighbourhood. Pittsburgh was being ravaged by the Great Depression, but Philadelphia was even worse. The harder the Quakers organization tried, the more pathetic things became, and they did not try for long. In the end they suffered the perhaps-unique distinction of being an NHL team outdrawn by a minor hockey team in the same building.

And somehow they did get worse. The 5-36-3 1929–30 Pittsburgh Pirates became the 4-36-4 Philadelphia Quakers. By points percentage it is the worst two-year run in NHL history, yes, worse than the expansion Washington Capitals. In the end the Quakers couldn't even fold properly. Frankly it's a miracle hockey survived in Pennsylvania at all.

August 5, 2026 Statistical history 2,434 words

Patrick Roy and the Incredible Improving Goalies

July 1, 2026 Statistical history 3,676 words

Here are the first eight full seasons of a goalie's NHL career and then, in the last row, his career totals. You know who this is, because his name is in the title and his picture is over there, but let's take a second and pretend. What would you think when you saw these?

Season	Age	GP	W	L	T	GA	Sh	Sv	Sv%	GAA	SO
1985–86	20	47	23	18	3	148	1186	1038	0.875	3.36	1
1986–87	21	46	22	16	6	131	1206	1075	0.891	2.94	1
1987–88	22	45	23	12	9	125	1248	1123	0.9	2.9	3
1988–89	23	48	33	5	6	113	1226	1113	0.908	2.47	4
1989–90	24	54	31	16	5	134	1522	1388	0.912	2.53	3
1990–91	25	48	25	15	6	128	1362	1234	0.906	2.71	1
1991–92	26	67	36	22	8	155	1806	1651	0.914	2.36	5
1992–93	27	62	31	25	5	192	1814	1622	0.894	3.2	2
8 Seasons		417	224	129	48	1126	11370	10244	0.901	3.14	20
Career		1029	551	315	131	2546	28346	25800	0.910	2.54	66

Even forcing the fact that this is Patrick Roy out of your mind with a bulldozer, you'll recognize a very fine goalie of the late '80s and early '90s. Then you'll look at the career stats and say "yes, of course, all-time great." I do not propose to surprise you with that. Everyone knows Patrick Roy was a great goalie and everyone is right. Sometimes, conventional wisdom is wise.

But see those season-by-season save percentages, then look at the bottom, to Patrick's career save percentage. Six of Roy's fisrt eight full seasons had save percentages below his career average; often quite a lot below. It is something of an article of faith in statistical circles that, and this fully deserves capital letters, Goalies Don't Improve; that by the time a goalie gets to the show he's enough of a finished article that you can't expect a lot more from him. Patrick Roy went from a .901 save percentage in his first eight seasons to a .910 overall; a difference of thirteen, fourteen goals against a season. If a skater goes from 36-goal seasons in his mid-twenties to 50-goal seasons in his thirties we have no trouble recognizing an improvement, though we might find it somewhat mystifying. Sure, Roy went from the high-scoring 1980s to the low-scoring 2000s, he played in an era where save percentages went up, but Patrick Roy was still the same goalie. The passage of time did not improve his reflexes. In fact, the conventional story is that Roy, by popularizing the butterfly, had a lot to do with what made his era one with high save percentages; in short, Roy should have been way ahead of the field early on, as a pioneer, but come back down to earth as the butterfly became ubiquitous. This, as you can see from that table and as you remember from his career, is not what happened.

July 1, 2026 Statistical history 3,676 words

The Great NHL Defensemen of the 1970s

June 24, 2026 Statistical history, Top NHL Defensemen by Decade 3,132 words

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.

June 24, 2026 Statistical history, Top NHL Defensemen by Decade 3,132 words

NHL Power Play Specialists

March 24, 2026 Statistical history 3,059 words

The greatest goalscorer on the power play in NHL history is Alexander Ovechkin, because he has the most goals.

Nobody's mad if you stop there. The job of the power play is to put the puck in the net and Alex Ovechkin has done that more than anyone, both with the man advantage and just generally. As of this writing, Ovechkin has scored 35.83% of his 921 NHL goals a man up; this will have changed by the time you're reading. 20% of NHL goals, give-or-take, are scored on the power play, so Ovechkin is conspicuously more effective with the man advantage than the statistical median NHL player. Which, since Ovechkin is quite a lot better than the statistical median NHL player, is not a surprise when you think about it.

Of course the power play is an advantage, it opens up more ice for the attacking team. Better players get more time on the power play, thus scoring a higher proportion of their goals there, and they should, because their skills mean they achieve more. This all makes sense after three seconds of thought. That the best scorers generally are also the best scorers on the man advantage is true, but uninteresting. If I had, say, the 2024–25 Anaheim Ducks, who were a decent team despite having one of the twenty worst power plays since recordkeeping began, I would not want you to tell me that I could use Leon Draisaitl; I knew that already. I would want to know what sort of player might make an impact disproportionate to his 5-on-5 skill with the man advantage, and might therefore be someone I can get. What I want, then, is a measure of a player as a power play specialist, the extent to which his powerplay productivity stood out from his normal scoring skills, and hopefully an idea of what type of player that is.

March 24, 2026 Statistical history 3,059 words