SUCS Values for WHA Players, 150+ GP
Following up on the Dominion Day article on WHA players, here are the 285 players who got into 150 or more WHA games and the SUCS score I assigned them by clicking around Hockey Reference and vibing out their careers. What a great opportunity! It's a 200-odd row table, which would have distorted the main article slightly, and since I'm now asking for your money in exchange for bonus posts, I get to tease you with what a bonus post might contain.
A few random notes on some decisions I found difficult:
Gordie Howe (4 SUCS) was, at the time he joined the WHA, the second-greatest or greatest player in hockey history. For most of his career, Gordie Howe was a 5 SUCS player, no question. When he joined the WHA, however, he had been retired for the past two seasons and his last NHL campaign, while pretty good, had not been first-class. So the question was not so much "should Gordie have been a 5 rather than a 4" but "should Gordie have been a 3 rather than a 4," in light of the fact that SUCS was meant to represent the player Gordie Howe actually was during the WHA epoch, not the player he had been during the Mercury program. I gave Gordie the four for two reasons: first, Gordie gets the benefit of the doubt on any question to do with aging, and second, after the merger Gordie went for a nostalgia skate with the Hartford Whalers that was not only thoroughly competent, but in line with his recent WHA performances. If Gordie had been really finished as a player, but the WHA propped him up like a protracted Weekend at Bernie's, you would expect him to have humiliated himself in the NHL in the 1979–80 season; that did not happen. He wasn't Gordie Howe anymore, but he was definitely an NHL player, and not a lot worse than he looked the year before in the WHA. It was evidence enough for me to give Gordie a reasonably conscientious 4.
