Comments on Five Hole Fanatics: The Dead Puck Era

Great post. It never occured to me that fedorov, B...

2008-08-04T11:11:00.000-06:00

Great post. It never occured to me that fedorov, Brind'Amour or Iginla might be the only ones to hit the 500 mark in the foreseeable future.

Sorry to plug one of my own posts here, but I wrote a post about the decline in goals scored per season.

Looking back att hose ten years, how in the hell did we put up eith it all?

Unfortunately, all the response I got was some guy wanting me to make more money...twice!

TPSH: Interesting post, but the fates of the play...

2008-08-04T04:04:00.000-06:00

TPSH: Interesting post, but the fates of the players you mentioned was one of the reasons for my intial hypothesis:

Jagr: goals before dead puck era: 125
Shanahan: goals before DPE: 224
Sakic: goals before DPE: 215
Sundin: goals before DPE: 135
Recchi: goals before DPE: 207
Tkachuk: goals before DPE: 72
Roenick: goals before DPE: 225
Modano: goals before DPE: 173

Maybe only Jagr and Sakic score 500 without considerable time before the 94/95 season. My point is that the goodly number of guys that reached the 500 plateau did it because they banked a lot of goals before the 'trap' descended. The fact that quite a lot of those guys got 500 is going to be contrasted in the next few years when a lot don't. I guess that was the real meat of my point, the 500 club was drying up; I surmised it was the dead puck era, but maybe it was just a dearth of good players.

I would argue that players such as Jaromir Jagr, B...

2008-08-04T01:59:00.000-06:00

I would argue that players such as Jaromir Jagr, Brendan Shanahan, Joe Sakic, Mats Sundin, Mark Recchi, Keith Tkachuk Jeremy Roenick and Mike Modano all scored 500 goals while playing in the "dead puck era". It corresponded with the prime years of everyone of those players. Thats a lot of players actually.

The idea that nobody seems to be almost ready to clear that hurdle right now is an interesting observation. It is tied to the dropoff in goals in the league and to the loss of time to lockouts (without a lockout season Sergei Fedorov whould either has 500 or be close enough to expect he would get their this season) and probably a relatively weak class of scorers who in their upper 20's or about 30 years old now.

Yeah, I definitely think there is a post in there ...

2008-08-03T03:29:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I definitely think there is a post in there about the emergence of Roy and the confluence of modern light equipment and the butterfly style. Older equipment slowed goalies down, especially late in games and late in seasons. The slowness forced a discipline of playing angles and concentration on positioning. As the newer equipment emerges the newer goalies can play deeper in their nets because their reaction speed becomes quicker and fatigue is less.

I imagine you could do a similar analysis on the o...

2008-08-02T14:13:00.000-06:00

I imagine you could do a similar analysis on the other side of the picture: goaltenders. I don't think it's a coincidence that Roy and Brodeur both straddled the era.

Interesting post.

I mean, right now, it's e...

2008-08-02T01:13:00.000-06:00

Interesting post.

I mean, right now, it's easy to say that Kovalchuk, Heatley, Hossa, Ovechkin, etc will all easily hit the mark.. but who knows how they could regress moving forward.

Jason Arnott could end up flirting with it. He'll fall short, but he could flirt with it.

Would be interesting to know how close a guy like Hejduk could've got though...

Interesting post CJ, I'd never looked at that befo...

2008-08-01T20:01:00.000-06:00

Interesting post CJ, I'd never looked at that before. I think you're right that Iginla is the only 30-something that's going to get there, although if Naslund hits a re-surgence AND manages to play at least 4 more years, he has a (very) outside shot still. It's nice to see how many young guys look like they'll get there eventually too now. My money is on Ovechkin to be next after Iginla.

I never realized how close Shanahan was to catching Rob Lucataille for 10th all-time! 1 more season could definitely do it.