- dothedougie

This guy gets it.

Look, guys like Thornton or Iginla or remembered as much for not winning a cup, compared to anything they accomplished in their regular season careers. Great players, but..... Always that but. Winners don't have a but.

Looks like the Oilers are about to go on a heater. In their remaining 14 games they are going 13-2-(-1); somehow they are going to turn an OTL into a Win. Hate to run into them in the playoffs.

March 12 picks:

NAS (W) @ ANA Wrong
MIN (W) at AZ Wrong
DET (WOT) @ BOS Wrong
OTT(W) @ CGY Wrong
CAR @ NJ (WOT) Wrong
VEG (W) @ STL Correct
NYR @ PITT (WOT) Correct
WIN (W) @ TAM Correct.

Next day you claim you went 6-2, when in fact you went 3-5.

March 11 picks:

AZ @ COL (W) Wrong
NYR(W) @ BUFF Wrong
LV (W) @ CAR Correct
CHI @ TB (W) Correct
STL (WOT) @ CBJ Wrong
DAL (W) @ SEA Wrong
DET @ BOS (WOT) Wrong
EDM @ TOR (W) Correct
WIN @ FLA (WOT) Wrong
NAS (WOT) @ LAK Correct
MIN (WOT) @ SAN Wrong
NJ (W) @ MTL Correct
WAS @ NYI (W) Wrong
OTT @ VAN (W) Correct
PHL @ PIT (W) Correct

Shows to me 7-8. But you claim you went 13-2. Care to show us how you went 13-2. Your numbers are about as off as your rumors.
- wreckage

dude, it's not worth your breathe. Ek does this to troll the trolls, so you come back to the page and make fun of him for being incompetent.

"You have some questionable memory. PIT won the SCs in 2009, 2016, and 2017. Crosby and Malkin were BY FAR the best center duo every one of those years. In fact, center depth was arguably #1 reason they won back to back SCs (Crosby, Malkin, Bonino, Cullen). Even now Crosby is at worst a top 5 center and Malkin is still a top 20 center. I agree EDM duo is offensively superior, but they are playing on the same line so that's not fair comparison."

I dont have the minutes but first off McDrai dont play on the same line obviously near as much as you are thinking.

2009 Sid was +3 with 33 goals and barely cracking 100 points... Thats... Not particularly indicative of him being generational. Or some kind of 2 way beast like Bergeron.

2016 & 2017 he is barely above ppg and none of these years are statistically superior to any of his other years.

I watched Sid & Malkin ALOT. I watched Lemuiex and Jagr ALOT. Penguins are one of my favorite teams.

I am an Oilers fans first and foremost but I follow all the greats as often as I can. Probably because if you are an Oilers fan from my era you used to watching great players and their is no real substitute.

What McDavid does on a day to day is "significantly" superior to what many most of all the great did on a day to day basis. Leon is not "that" far behind and IMO the second best player on the planet currently. Anyone see his put the net back on and score top corner with the goalie already set and no daylight left last week? I've always like the Leon to Malkin comparable. Both very big superstars with similar impacts. But McDavid is literally on another level than SId IMO.... and I am not even a big Mcdavid fan.

"You have some questionable memory. PIT won the SCs in 2009, 2016, and 2017. Crosby and Malkin were BY FAR the best center duo every one of those years. In fact, center depth was arguably #1 reason they won back to back SCs (Crosby, Malkin, Bonino, Cullen). Even now Crosby is at worst a top 5 center and Malkin is still a top 20 center. I agree EDM duo is offensively superior, but they are playing on the same line so that's not fair comparison."

I dont have the minutes but first off McDrai dont play on the same line obviously near as much as you are thinking.

2009 Sid was +3 with 33 goals and barely cracking 100 points... Thats... Not particularly indicative of him being generational. Or some kind of 2 way beast like Bergeron.

2016 & 2017 he is barely above ppg and none of these years are statistically superior to any of his other years.

I watched Sid & Malkin ALOT. I watched Lemuiex and Jagr ALOT. Penguins are one of my favorite teams.

I am an Oilers fans first and foremost but I follow all the greats as often as I can. Probably because if you are an Oilers fan from my era you used to watching great players and their is no real substitute.

What McDavid does on a day to day is "significantly" superior to what many most of all the great did on a day to day basis. Leon is not "that" far behind and IMO the second best player on the planet currently. Anyone see his put the net back on and score top corner with the goalie already set and no daylight left last week? I've always like the Leon to Malkin comparable. Both very big superstars with similar impacts. But McDavid is literally on another level than SId IMO.... and I am not even a big Mcdavid fan.
- Aerchon

I already provided the numbers. So far ~35% of ES this season McDrai are together. The highest % for Malkin and Crosby together was 5% in 2014. Already that's a huge discrepancy for making comparisons. Secondly, scoring is much higher now than in 2009. There are double the number of point per game players in 2023 compared to 2009.

This guy gets it.

Look, guys like Thornton or Iginla or remembered as much for not winning a cup, compared to anything they accomplished in their regular season careers. Great players, but..... Always that but. Winners don't have a but.
- PDO-Speedwagon

I'm just glad that Alexander Ovechkin finally became a good hockey player in 2018.

I'm just glad that Alexander Ovechkin finally became a good hockey player in 2018.
- jmatchett383

Yeah, what a scrub. He is no Richard Park.

Crosby and Malkin are winners that won 3 Stanley Cup and play to make their teammates better.
Mc D is great but he's selfish and only plays for himself.
Draisaitl is a great player but in order to get the most out of him he has to play with McD.
That's why the Oilers don't win.

I'm just glad that Alexander Ovechkin finally became a good hockey player in 2018.
- jmatchett383

Nobody said Ovi wasn't good before he won a cup.

The league is filled with good players who will never win a cup.

Good players become great with a cup.

Mediocre or lucky players who got their names engraved for being in the right place at the right time, aren't great because they had a cup.

McDavid is an aberration. He should have at least one cup already, but he's been dragging a dead horse for his entire career. He's great, but he will become a bonafide "winner" when he has a cup ring.

Crosby and Malkin are winners that won 3 Stanley Cup and play to make their teammates better.
Mc D is great but he's selfish and only plays for himself.
Draisaitl is a great player but in order to get the most out of him he has to play with McD.
That's why the Oilers don't win.
- islansjet

See responses like these make me laugh for a couple of reasons.

One, the idea that some rando who watches games on TV (or even just catches highlights or listens to terrible sports radio shows) can say things like "McDavid is selfish and only plays for himself" with absolute, 100% conviction and certainty that they are correct. As if any of us know what is going through his head.

Two, the hilarious and self-contradictory notion that all the credit or blame for success or failure goes to one or two star players ... but at the very same time saying that the reason that McDavid doesn't win is because he's supposedly not a team player. So which is it, then? Do teammates matter or not? Because if you can only win by being a team player, then you'd better have teammates who can carry their fair share of the mail.

And don't give me any garbage about how elite players "make their teammates better." For starters, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is on pace for 99 points this year and Zach Hyman is tracking toward 87, so I think it's fair to say McDavid is doing plenty of that already. Two, even if you're making your teammates better, it turns out it's a lot easier to turn guys like Kunitz, Dupuis, Kessel, Hornqvist, and Neal (e.g., players who were already successful top six wingers on their own) into first line scoring threats than Kailer Yamamoto and Jesse Puljujarvi. And three, Connor McDavid can't make his teammates better when he's on the bench, which he is for two thirds of the game.

A strong MVP candidate is worth roughly 6 wins. A typical cutoff for a team to be considered a "contender" is something like 50 wins. Which means if you're responsible for 6 of those wins yourself, your teammates are responsible for generating the other 44.

Put another way, a HOF-caliber player in his prime is probably personally responsible for 10-20 percent of his team's overall success, depending on how good the rest of his team is. Which is in some ways a lot (considering each player on a 20-man roster is 5% of the team) and in other ways not a lot (because it means 80%-90% of the team's success comes from the rest of the team).

When Gretzky won his Cups he had Messier, Coffey, Kurri, Andersson, and Fuhr with him. When Lemieux won his Cups he had Jagr, Francis, Murphy, even Recchi and Coffey for the first one. Gretzky and Lemieux are widely considered to be the two greatest players of all time, and even they were only able to win the Cup in seasons where they had multiple other Hall of Famers at or near their primes also on the roster.

In the cap era it's not really possible to assemble superteams like the 80s Oilers and the early 90s Penguins any more, but you still need a strong supporting cast. To give Crosby and Malkin all of the credit for the Penguins' Cups is an insult to players like Letang, Kunitz, Fleury, and others who also carried a significant amount of the load. And giving McDavid all of the blame for the current Oilers' failures means letting the real villains (Peter Chiarelli and Ken Holland) off the hook.

A strong MVP candidate is worth roughly 6 wins. A typical cutoff for a team to be considered a "contender" is something like 50 wins. Which means if you're responsible for 6 of those wins yourself, your teammates are responsible for generating the other 44.

Put another way, a HOF-caliber player in his prime is probably personally responsible for 10-20 percent of his team's overall success, depending on how good the rest of his team is. Which is in some ways a lot (considering each player on a 20-man roster is 5% of the team) and in other ways not a lot (because it means 80%-90% of the team's success comes from the rest of the team).

When Gretzky won his Cups he had Messier, Coffey, Kurri, Andersson, and Fuhr with him. When Lemieux won his Cups he had Jagr, Francis, Murphy, even Recchi and Coffey for the first one. Gretzky and Lemieux are widely considered to be the two greatest players of all time, and even they were only able to win the Cup in seasons where they had multiple other Hall of Famers at or near their primes also on the roster.

In the cap era it's not really possible to assemble superteams like the 80s Oilers and the early 90s Penguins any more, but you still need a strong supporting cast. To give Crosby and Malkin all of the credit for the Penguins' Cups is an insult to players like Letang, Kunitz, Fleury, and others who also carried a significant amount of the load. And giving McDavid all of the blame for the current Oilers' failures means letting the real villains (Peter Chiarelli and Ken Holland) off the hook.
- Sven22

Thank you for perfectly describing how I feel about the praise/blame star players receive for team success. There's never been a player who single-handedly carried his team to a cup. Conversely, there's never been a star player who single-handedly cost their team a cup. But the "Maroon is a bigger winner than Ovechkin, McDavid, Iginla and Thornton combined" types of people tend to simplify it for ease of comparison. Winning and losing is far more nuanced than that.