Bobby Orr, Nick Lidstrom, and Greatness

The other day, I was having an argument with a person from Detroit. It was not about Justin Verlander, which is somewhat surprising. Rather, it was about Nick Lidstrom, who I would contend is one of the top five defensemen of all time—in fact, I think that at this point, there couldn’t really be contention about that. But he wanted to say that Lidstrom was number one, that he wasn’t just better than Coffey and Bourque and Harvey but, also, better than Bobby Orr. Frankly, that’s just heresy.

But it did remind me of something that Bill Simmons is always saying: that, at some point (it may have already happened) you would have to take the x number of great Dirk years over the y number of exceptional Larry Bird years. No matter how dominant someone was at their peak, no matter if flags fly forever, a very very good player who you can win a championship with at any point over a fifteen-year career is going to be more valuable than a player who you are slightly more likely to win one with over only eight years. And at this point, Nick Lidstrom has been playing at a very high level since 1991.

So I thought about it for awhile, and decided to look at their various experiences in playing. The problem, of course, is that hockey is much harder to compare across ages than baseball or basketball. Goal-tending was basically reinvented by Jacques Plante in 1959, again by Tony Esposito in the early 1970s, and again by Martin Brodeur and Dominik Hasek in the 1990s. Goals were down in the 1960s (unless you played for Montreal), up in 1970s, WAY up in 1980s, mixed in the 1990 and 2000s. For a comparison, here is my ‘upper echelon’ of defensemen with their point totals included:

	Norris	Seasons	Games	Cups	PTS
Bobby Orr	8	8.5	657	2	915
Nick Lidstrom	7	18.5	1500	4	1112
Doug Harvey	7	15	1113	6	540
Ray Bourque	5	22	1612	1	1579

Bourque was a legitimate point-per-game defenseman for twenty years. For comparison, Nick Lidstrom has score a point per game once in his career (2005-6), which happened to be the first time (as far as I can tell) that anyone had done it since Bourque recorded 82 in 82 games in 1995-96. Doug Harvey was the best blueliner on the most dominant teams in the history of hockey, but he didn’t score a lot (he played before Orr, which means he played a different form of hockey). Bobby Orr… well the guy was named best defensive player in the game in each full season that he played.

Bobby Orr: his 1.393 points per game are fourth all-time, behind only Gretzky, Lemieux, and Bossy. In some ways, he combined the greatest strengths of guys like Coffey and Niedermayer—he would join the rush, score goals, assist everything in sight, and then he would beat you back, out-position you, and throw you around in front of his own net. People who played against him still tell stories in hushed tones about how he fundamentally changed the way you played because he always had the puck, how before him, defensemen didn’t do that, how Orr almost single-handedly remade the position in his own image. His knees remain one of the tragedies of pre-modern sports medicine, like Bossy’s back or Neely’s legs. Watching guys like Ray Allen jump, you can only imagine what modern treatment could have done for him.

On the other hand, Bourque and Lidstrom played against stiffer competition, and for a whole lot longer. And… that really makes a difference. You ask me who the greatest defenseman of all time was, and I still think I have to say Orr. There simply was no one better than him. Ever. But If I had to choose one guy to start with and build my team around that one defender for their entire career… I would have to choose between the two more recent guys.

As a side note, I am always intrigued by the idea of building those “all-time” teams, because I find the defensive pairings so intriguing. Offense we’ve seen—frankly, I don’t think putting Gretzky and Lemieux together would get you a whole lot more than you get out of Gretzky’s 80s Oilers, or Lemieux and Jagr, or the early 70s Bruins teams. But—with a nod to the Ducks of the late 2000s—combining out-of-this-world defensemen doesn’t happen often. Ray Bourque and Orr playing together? Let’s throw in some good forwards too, like Zetterberg, Yzerman, and Jere Lehtinen, say, and you’ve got a line that’s absolutely… well, my thoughts on defensive efficiency have been chronicled elsewhere, I guess.