The Athletic Hockey Show: Ranking the rankings

On this week's episode of The Athletic Hockey Show:
- Julian McKenzie steps in for Ian, who is still too sad about the 49ers
- We talk NHL99, and Julian has some questions about my ballot
- Jesse weights in on where the goalies ranked
- My attempt to make a movie reference fails miserably
- A listener wants to know about Jamie Benn's HHOF case
- This week in history and more...

The Athletic Hockey Show runs most days of the week during the season, with Ian and I hosting every Thursday. There are two versions of each episode available:
- An ad-free version for subscribers that you can find here
- An ad-supported version you can get for free wherever you normally find your podcasts (like Apple or Spotify)

NHL99: Ray Bourque had to be in our top 10 — here are 77 reasons why

Is it possible to be recognized as one of the ten best players of the modern era and still be underrated?

I think it is. And I think you could argue that the concept applies to Ray Bourque, a player who dominated the NHL for two decades and is my pick as the second-best defenseman of all-time, and yet still doesn’t seem to get enough respect among this generation of fans.

How do I help fix that, now that our countdown has reached Bourque? I suppose I could wax eloquently, or track down some former teammates who witnessed his greatness up close, or find a few signature plays to break down. But you know what? We’re 90 picks into this project, and I don’t feel like doing subtle. Instead, I’m breaking out the firehose.

With apologies to Paul Coffey and Victor Hedman, Ray Bourque was the most famous #77 in NHL history. So today, you’re getting 77 facts about him. If you kids out there aren’t on board by the end, then I’ve done all I can. And for the rest of us, it’s a chance to remember some of the greatest stats, moments and oddities from one of the most dominant careers we’ve ever seen.

1. Ray Bourque was born December 28, 1960, which means he shares a birthday with fellow Hall-of-Famers Harry Howell and Terry Sawchuk. That’s really neither here not there, but I think it’s neat. Keep your head up, Mario and St. Patrick.

2. Bourque was good in junior. That’s weird to write, because it was probably the last time for about 20 years that you could stop at “good” with this guy.

3. He had 93 points for the QMJHL’s Verdun Black Hawks in 1978-79, in a season in which he was just 17 on opening night. Those were big numbers, but in that era of the Q, they weren’t jaw-dropping. He was 56 points back of forward Normand Aubin for the team lead, and trailed Michel Leblanc among league defensemen. He was only a few points ahead of Kevin Lowe.

4. All of which is to say: He was a very good prospect, but hardly a can’t-miss. And when the NHL draft rolled around, Bourque watched fellow defensemen Rob Ramage, Craig Hartsburg and Keith Brown go ahead of him.

5. Yes, Keith Brown. Look, scouting is harder than it looks.

6. By the way, this was the infamous “double cohort” draft which saw the NHL lower the age threshold by a year, resulting in what’s often considered the best class ever. Bourque would go on to rank second in the draft in games played and points, trailing third-rounder Mark Messier in both categories.

7. If you’re a Bruins fan who got to enjoy the Ray Bourque era, you can thank a man named Ron Grahame.

8. Well, you should actually thank Harry Sinden, who was the guy who traded Grahame to the Los Angeles Kings on the eve of the 1978-79 season. The Kings had been a decent team for years, but weren’t breaking through in the playoffs, and Grahame was a young goalie who’d just posted very solid numbers in his first year in Boston. The Kings needed a replacement for Rogie Vachon, so they made the deal.

9. In hindsight, it was a bad move for L.A., but this was no Sam Pollock situation where a dumb team traded away a pick that was obviously going to be high. The Kings put up 80 points with Grahame, comfortably making the playoffs. In a 16-team league, that translated to the 8th overall pick, and in 1979 that meant a chance to draft Bourque.

10. Grahame won 23 games in three seasons with the Kings, so… let’s call the trade even.

11. Wait, hold on. All this early-career stuff is nice and all, but did Sean just casually slip in a “second-best defenseman ever?” reference up above in that intro? Yes, I did, and now that you’ve settled into this piece, there’s something we need to talk about.

12. OK, look – I love Nicklas Lidstrom. He was an absolute stud. If you’re a fan of his, you may have noticed that he hasn’t appeared yet in this Top 100, so you’ve got a sense of how highly regarded he was by our voters. There isn’t a reasonable hockey fan alive who wouldn’t trade just about any player their favorite team has ever had for a career of Nicklas Lidstrom locking down the blueline. An undisputed legend.

13. BUT! At some point in the last decade or so, it feels like hockey fans decided that “Nicklas Lidstrom is the second-best defenseman ever” was settled science. If anything, the controversial part of that statement might be “second”, because there are fans out there who’d put him ahead of Bobby Orr, too. (Those fans are wrong, but let’s roll with it.)

14. Is Lidstrom number two? Maybe! You could absolutely make that argument. But it is an argument, and anyone who claims otherwise is doing it because they don’t understand just how good Ray Bourque really was. He was right there with Lidstrom, and yes, he might have been even better.

15. The purpose of this piece is not to diminish Lidstrom in any way, or any other great defenseman that may be in that Orr conversation. But I still can’t help but feel like there’s a generation out there that doesn’t appreciate what Ray Bourque did for over two decades. So to borrow a turn of phrase from another legendary Bruin, we’re going to use this as an opportunity to pump his tires.

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NHL99: Don’t diminish Marcel Dionne with a pointless Stanley Cup asterisk

Ernie Banks. Dan Marino. Charles Barkley. Don Mattingly. Patrick Ewing. Barry Sanders.

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As a sports fan, what do you think of when you hear those names?

I’d like to think that your mind floods with memories of amazing moments, historic achievements, highlight reels, records and milestones. If you were lucky enough to see at least a few of them play with your own eyes, I hope those are the moments that leap to mind. If they’re simply names from the past for you, then maybe you’re conjuring up old highlights, or better yet, stories that older sports fans in your life have passed down to you. I’d like to think that.

But I know there’s a good chance you’re thinking of something else, something that unites those names. You’re thinking about a dreaded qualifier that gets pinned to an otherwise unquestioned superstar’s career like a scarlet letter: They never won the big one.

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NHL99: Jarome Iginla, the last of the NHL’s great power forwards

I want you to stop for a moment and picture the most iconic Jarome Iginla moment. Not your personal favorite, or even the most important, but the one that best represents who he was to you. If a brand new hockey fan showed up and wanted to know why everyone – not just Flames fans, but everyone -- seems to love this Iginla guy so much and you had time to show them one clip, which one would it be?

You’d have a ton of choices. You  could show them a goal; counting the playoffs, you’d have over 650 to choose from. You might go with a milestone moment, like his 500th goal or 1,000th point, or when he became the Flames’ all-time leading scorer. His epic overtime shift in the 2004 final would have to be way up there on the list. You might choose one of his Team Canada highlights, like his laser beam one-timer late in the 2002 gold medal game, or the time that he and everyone else heard the infamous IGGY. You might even go off the board and choose the time he led the Flames in paying respect to Trevor Linden after his long-time rival’s final game, the sort of pure-class gesture we don’t see often in sports these days.

Any of those would be great choices. But I’m guessing they may not be what came to mind first. Instead, there’s a good chance you thought of this:

That's Iginla and Tampa’s Vincent Lecavalier dropping the gloves in early in Game 3 of the 2004 Stanley Cup final. Iginla is Calgary’s biggest star and their captain; Lecavalier is the franchise player the Lightning have been building around. A fight between two superstars, in a crucial playoff game, just isn’t supposed to happen. But it does, because this is a battle for a championship and neither player is willing to give an inch.

You don’t have to like fighting in hockey or even understand it to get what’s happening here. There’s nothing dirty, and it’s not some staged production between two guys with nothing better to do. It’s just two stars on a collision course, staring each other down and saying “I’m not going anywhere and I know you’re not either, so what do you want to do about it?”

Iginla wins the fight, of course, because he almost always did. He didn’t fight often, maybe a handful of times a year, because he didn’t have to. But if it needed to be done, he was there. That was what made Iginla such a special player – he could do just about anything that his team needed him to do. A goal? Of course. A dominating shift? Yes. Win the crucial battles in his own zone? Often. A crushing open ice hit to flip the momentum? More than a few. And yes, if somebody needed to step up and trade punches, putting themselves at risk just to make it clear that this team wasn’t backing down from anyone, Iginla was willing and able to do that too.

Jarome Iginla kicked ass. Sometimes, literally. And there’s a very good chance that we’ll never see a player quite like him ever again.

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NHL99: Doug Gilmour and how the biggest trade in NHL history turned him into a superstar

Your team is about to make a trade. A big one. And not just one of those standard-issue rental deals we see so much of these days, in which only one team is really trying to improve while the other is kicking the can down the road. No, this is two teams that are both trying to get better, right now, and carefully exchanging pieces to try to make it happen.

How do you want the trade to work out?

If you’re feeling polite, you might say that you hope it ends up being a win for both teams. You’ll miss the players who are heading the other way, and you wish them nothing but the best. Trading doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, you might remind yourself, and a good one can work out just fine for both teams. You would tell yourself that because you’re a good person.

You would be lying. You don’t want that at all.

No, you want the trade to be so lopsided that it feels unfair. You want to read about it on those “biggest heist in sports history” lists for decades to come. You want everyone your team dealt away to turn into a pumpkin. And somehow, against all odds, you want the key piece coming back in the deal to level up into something they’ve never been before. You want the guy you didn’t give up all that much to get to find another gear and become the best player on the team. No, screw that, since we’re getting crazy, maybe the best player in the whole league.

In other words, you want your team’s blockbuster to turn into the Doug Gilmour trade. But the problem with Doug Gilmour trades is that they don’t happen very often. Maybe, you could argue, only once.

We can still feel the impact of the Doug Gilmour trade today. It screwed up the perception of how trades work for an entire generation of hockey fans. It decimated a Stanley Cup winner that still hasn’t won another title since. And it reinvigorated a hockey market that wasn’t quite dying but was certainly in a coma, one self-inflicted by two decades of incompetence.

And yeah, if you haven’t guessed it by now, this is one of those pieces that’s going to get kind of Maple Leafs-centric, even though Gilmour played over two-thirds of his 20-year career for a collection of a half-dozen other teams. If you’re the sort of person who’s bothered by that, I don’t know what to tell you. Doug Gilmour, who comes in at No. 66 on The Athletic’s list of the greatest players of the NHL’s modern era, was a very good player for a very long time for a very long list of NHL teams. But for a couple of seasons in Toronto, he became something more, and that’s what we’re going to focus on because this is my piece.

Let’s look back at the most important trade in the history of the NHL, assuming you define that history through the eyes of a thoroughly disillusioned and hopeless young Maple Leafs fan.

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Alexander Mogilny’s brilliance and his curious absence from the Hall of Fame

In the century-plus history of the NHL, only six players have ever scored more than 75 goals in a season. It’s an almost incomprehensible feat, especially in today’s era when a player even nudging 60 is seen as a stunning achievement. To get there, a player needs to score nearly a goal per game over the course of a full season, a level of production that even legendary scorers like Mike Bossy, Alexander Ovechkin, Pavel Bure and Jaromir Jagr never reached.

Of the six players to top 75 goals, five are in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Three of them — Phil Esposito, Teemu Selanne and Brett Hull — made it in as soon as they became eligible. Two more, Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, made it even sooner, with the Hall waiving its three-year waiting period to induct them early.

The sixth member of the 75-goal club isn’t in the Hall of Fame at all. Not yet, anyway, despite over a decade of eligibility. It stands as one of the Hall’s most inexcusable oversights, and we need to talk about it. But to tell the story of Alexander Mogilny — who comes it at No. 89 on our list of the top 100 players in modern NHL history — we have to go back further than that monster 1992-93 season. We need to go back to the beginning, to the story of how a 20-year-old phenom changed the NHL forever.

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