How much talent would there be in a 6-team NHL?

From the random, whimsical mind of Mark Norman:

I was wondering the other day how high the skill level in the NHL would be if the league still only had six teams. This thought process was somewhat of a continuation from various conversations about the saturation of talent in the 12-team Olympic tournament. So, naturally, I decided to do a research project to satisfy my curiosity.

The results were spectacular. Imagine Sidney Crosby centering Patrick Marleau and Teemu Selanne (a combined 119 goals and 234 points in the 2009-10 season). Or Alex Ovechkin terrorizing opponents with linemates Jonathan Toews and Jarome Iginla (107g, 245p in 09-10). Or a defensive corps that features Zdeno Chara and Brent Seabrook patrolling the blue-line in front of Martin Brodeur. You get the idea.

Before presenting the rosters, I will briefly outline the methodology behind my madness:

1. The top players were ranked at each position to fill out the six rosters (24 centres, 48 wingers, 36 defensemen and 12 goalies). Rankings were mostly based on statistical performance this season, however I subjectively included some players who may not be shining statistically this season for a variety of reasons (injury, off year, excellent player beyond statistics, etc.).

2. Having determined the top performers at each position, I sorted each position alphabetically as a way to randomize the skill level of players.

3. I then assigned players from each position to the six teams in a “draft” format (e.g. Team #1 got centre #1, #7, #13 and #19). Because the players were sorted alphabetically, this should have resulted in a random distribution of talent level to the different teams.

4. Finally, I subjectively sorted each team into four lines (centre and two wingers), three defensive pairings and a goaltending tandem. This process was based on a combination of statistics and my own perception of players’ abilities.

5. Two other points: 1) I am sure that some worthy players were excluded, and this is obviously by no means exhaustive; 2) For the sake of convenience, I used the Original 6 teams. Obviously if I was commissioner of this league, though, the Canucks would be in the league!

Okay, so without further ado, here is this puckhead’s dream-come-true—the line-ups for a modern-day Original 6 NHL:

Boston Bruins

Forward Lines
Ovechkin	Toews	Iginla
Zetterberg	Lecavalier	Perry
Frolov	Spezza	Gionta
Sullivan	Duchene	Stempniak
Defense Pairings
Keith	Green
S. Niedermayer	Brian Campbell
Robidas	Zidlicky
Goalies
Kiprusoff
Ward

Chicago Blackhawks

Forward Lines
Kovalchuk	Stamkos	Semin
Vanek	Carter	Kovalev
Burrows	Kesler	Hejduk
Backes	Mike Richards	Samuelsson
Defense Pairings
Lidstrom	Bouwmeester
Pronger	Johnson, J
Timonen	Edler
Goalies
Miller
Bryzgalov

Detroit Red Wings

Forward Lines
Marleau	Crosby	Selanne
Cammalleri	Savard	Doan
Sharp	Paul Stastny	Hemsky
Ray Whitney	Mikko Koivu	Langenbrunner
Defense Pairings
Boyle	Andrei Markov
Rafalski	Jovanovski
Ehrhoff	Visnovsky
Goalies
Nabokov Fleury

Montreal Canadiens

Forward Lines
Daniel Sedin	Getzlaf	Heatley
Kessel	Brad Richards	Bobby Ryan
Dustin Brown	Jordan Staal	Briere
Holmstrom	Bergeron	Umberger
Defense Pairings
Doughty	Suter
Blake	Erik Johnson
Pitkanen	Letang
Goalies
Luongo
Backstrom

New York Rangers

Forward Lines
Marian Hossa	Datsyuk	Nash
Elias	Henrik Sedin	Gaborik
Morrow	Joe Thornton	St. Louis
Wolski	Kopitar	Smyth
Defense Pairings
Weber	Kaberle
Myers	Gonchar
Regehr	Burns
Goalies
Vokoun
Halak

Toronto Maple Leafs

Forward Lines
Parise	Malkin	Patrick Kane
Havlat	Backstrom	Alfredsson
Tavares	Eric Staal	Gagne
Bourque	Franzen	Pominville
Defense Pairings
Chara	Seabrook
Phaneuf	Hamhuis
Komisarek	Barker
Goalies
Brodeur
Lundqvist

Fanning the flames of the Vancouver/Calgary rivalry

Hi folks, it's been a while since I posted here at 'Nucks and Pucks. Been a busy time with school, so I have been neglecting my blogging duties. I did find time to write a post at Nucks Misconduct about why, as a Canucks fan, I feel obligated to hate our #1 rivals, the Calgary Flames. Please check it out if you haven't done so yet!

I will hopefully have more time to post here in the near future, so please check back soon!

Edmontonians hold it in for Gold Medal action, let it go during intermission

This is pretty hilarious. During the Gold Medal game two weekends ago, Edmonton's water usage drops significantly during the action and rises dramatically during the intermission. Guess no one was willing to miss a second of the action to take a washroom break.

This great graph comes from Yale Professor Chris Blattman's international development blog, of all places. As he notes, "I believe the beer consumption picture looks exactly the same, but upside down."

H/T to my friend Lev for the link.

Around the Rink: Post-Olympic euphoria?

Every once in a while 'Nucks and Pucks will offer links to some of the best hockey stories of the past few days. It's a chance for me to share the great hockey sites, blogs, and writers that entertain and inspire me. Enjoy!

• Hockey on the cover of Sports Illustrated! As you can see in the above image, Sidney Crosby graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. This is actually a big deal, as hockey does not feature this prominently in SI very often - even the Stanley Cup champions rarely make it to the cover of America's biggest sports publication anymore. Clearly the US making the Gold Medal game generated some serious hype south of the 49th, which is great to see. [Sports Illustrated]
  

• Eyeballs glued to TV screens: That serious hype translated into amazing ratings for the game both in Canada and (more importantly for the NHL) in the US. Roughly one in three American TVs was tuned in to the hockey game last Sunday, making it the second most-watched non-NFL sporting event of the year. Furthermore, the game beat out all World Series games since 2004 and every NBA and NCAA basketball final games since 1998. Awesome news for hockey interest in the States. [Puck the Media]

• But let's keep it in perspective... As Puck Daddy points out, many of these viewers are casual sports fans who will not automatically start following the NHL. Nonetheless, the momentum may generate interest in the sport amongst young athletes and hopefully help grom the game at a grassroots level. [Puck Daddy]
  

• Sid's celebration: Speaking of Puck Daddy, the blog launched an impromptu Photoshop competition in honour of Sidney Crosby's epic "golden roar" celebration pose. The first gallery is up here. My (weak) Microsoft Paint submission is below - it celebrates Crosby's maturation and ownership of Alex Ovechkin in major competitions, as well as Ovechkin's unfortunate freak-out following Russia's elimination at the tournament. [Puck Daddy]

• Meanwhile, From the Rink is bully on the mainstream publicity that Crosby is receiving - despite him not ranking as one of the game's all-time greats. [From the Rink]

• And finally, in case you missed it, Canada's Gold Medal victory touched off celebrations across the country. I posted three galleries of photos from the Toronto celebrations at Dundas Square, and posted some photos and video at Nucks Misconduct. Please do check it out! [Nucks Misconduct]
  

Women's Hockey at the Olympics: Should it stay or should it go now?

Another Winter Olympics, another Canada/US Gold Medal game. With the exception of 2006 in Turin, when the Swedish team pulled a remarkable upset of the heavily-favoured Americans in the semi-finals, the 2010 Games in Vancouver marked yet another chapter in the ongoing trend of the two North American hockey superpowers meeting for Olympic Gold every four years - since women's hockey got the IOC stamp of approval and was introduced in 1998 in Nagano, Canada has won three Golds and one Silver, while the US has one Gold, two Silvers and one Bronze.

Talk about domination.

The lack of parity in international competition has led to a number of calls for women's hockey to be excluded from future Olympic competitions - much like women's softball in the Summer Games - and notable critics include IOC President Jacques Rogge:

"We cannot continue without improvement. There is a discrepancy there, everyone agrees with that. This is maybe the investment period in women's ice hockey. I would personally give them more time to grow - but there must be a period of improvement."

The primary issue is not (explicitly) about gender, but rather competitiveness. The issue of North American dominance has been present in international women's hockey since its World Championship debut in 1990. Canada and the US finished first and second respectively, until 2005 when the US finally won the tournament. No team has ever finished first or second except for the two superpowers. In fact, before the Swedish upset of the US in 2006, no team had ever beaten the US or Canada except for each other.

Supporters of Olympic women's hockey argue that the women's game needs the Olympics to grow the game and raise the quality of non-North American hockey. The reasoning behind this is that the Olympics serve as an incentive for national hockey federations to promote the game within their borders. As Jason Kay of The Hockey News writes:

"The Olympics, meantime, are the dangling carrot for national federations, providing heightened incentive to get better. Remove the carrot and the horse slows down. . . . Best-on-best competitions are critical for the embryonic hockey programs. It not only provides a measuring stick for executives, demonstrating how big the gap is between their programs and others, but gives the actual participants first-hand experiences and lessons on how to improve. You can study all the film you want, but there’s no substitute for facing a superior foe in real, intense competition."

There is a definite logic to this argument, particularly given the allure of Olympic glory. But will countries make the investment into women's hockey given that, for the immediate future, they're basically trying to build a Bronze Medal team? Well, they should. As Sweden proved in 2006 upsets are possible, if rare. Furthermore, while Canada and the US will continue to have much deeper pools of talent to draw upon for decades to come, the beauty of the Olympics is that you only need 23 players on your roster - it's hard to imagine that a men's US 'B' team would have fared nearly as well against a Canada 'B' squad, but none of that mattered in the Olympic format. Same with the women's game. If countries like Sweden, Finland, Russia and China (yes, China has a competitive program that has grown by leaps and bounds) can get to the point where they develop elite players that can stack a full roster, they will begin to challenge Canada and the US in tournaments.

Unfortunately, this appears to be a long way from happening. As Sarah Kwak notes about the Russian program:

"The women's team receives minimal financial support from the Russian federation and little training for the World Championships and the Olympics. In anticipation of Vancouver, Russia's women gathered for sporadic international tournaments such as the Canada Cup, and didn't begin their final Olympic training camp until January 24, three weeks before the Games. To compare, by the end of January, Team Canada was on the tail end of its six-month Midget Series during which it played teams of teenage boys. Says [Russian player] Gavrilova, "I don't think [three weeks is] good enough to get trained for the Olympics.""

Clearly women's hockey is not getting the funding (to say nothing of attention and respect) it needs to develop more than two elite national teams. However, according to Kwak, there is hope that the "Olympic carrot" will spur development in Russia:

With the Games heading to Sochi in four years, it's difficult to believe the Russians wouldn't want to field a competitive women's hockey team. Federation president Vladislav Tretiak has promised more attention and funding, ostensibly for that exact reason, and went with a young team in Vancouver to prepare these players for the next Olympics.

But, for this to be effective, much more than funding and development is necessary:

Russian sport remains highly patriarchal. The country has never tapped a woman to carry the flag at the Opening Ceremonies -- Summer or Winter -- and still prefers to see its female athletes participate in tennis, gymnastics and figure skating, rather than sports like hockey and soccer. "It's a bit of a new concept, women playing hockey," says Slava Malamud, a reporter for the Russian paper Sport-Express. "There's a popular Russian song, kind of the unofficial theme song for Russian hockey, that says, 'Only real men play hockey.' So it's still hard for people to wrap their brains around it."

Clearly a lot has to change for international women's hockey to develop to the point of competitiveness - from resources to gender attitudes to player development. So how to start the ball rolling? In my opinion, women's hockey needs a professional league (or at least semi-pro one, where athletes may hold other jobs but still receive a decent salary - think of the Canadian Football League or National Lacrosse League).

Currently, there are not a lot of options for elite female hockey players. In the US, the NCAA offers possibly the best environment in the world for competitive women's hockey outside of national competitions - at least until the athletes graduate and are left with no other place to play. In Canada, there are two amateur leagues of note: the Canadian Women's Hockey League, with six teams in Ontario and Quebec; and the Western Women's Hockey League, which has a combined four Canadian teams in Alberta and BC and one team in Minnesota.

Fortunately, with the controversy surrounding women's hockey in 2010, a push for a professional women's league has gained new momentum. It makes a lot of sense. Think how much this would help develop international players, who would get to play against stiffer competition and improve their skills with the world's best coaches. This is, realistically, the only way that non-North American players will develop into the elite players that international teams so desperately need to be competitive. Maybe each team could have a quote for international players - e.g. they have to have at least five non-North Americans on their rosters. This would prevent the teams from being flooded by Canadian and American talent.

I really hope that a pro women's league can get up and running. Partnering with the NHL, much like the WNBA does with the NBA, is probably the best way to get the league started. This is not ideal, as I think a women's league would be governed and managed more effectively if it was independent. Nonetheless, for marketing, cross-promotional and financial reasons it does make sense to partner with the NHL.

But please, if this happens, don't call the league the Women's NHL - that will only perpetuate the gender inequality that currently plagues hockey by suggesting the new league's inferiority.

Overall, I think that a semi- or fully professional hockey league is the best answer to the problem of serious competitive imbalance in women's hockey.