Poll: Top Penguins of all time project -- interest?

[mikey]

With an uncharacteristically long offseason on the horizon, I'm interested in doing a Penguin-centric project. With many prominent Penguins careers now in more or less the rear view mirror, I think it might be a good time to re-visit our history - recent and much further back - to formulate who the top Penguins of all time are.

The way I'd see the process going is...

1. I'll setup some general rules regarding eligibility (min. games played, etc.)

2.Then we have a preliminary discussion thread - a thread that will include no rankings, but is more to just put players out there for some high-level discussion. Anyone is welcome to participate...submit video evidence, anecdotal thoughts, newspaper excerpts, stats...whatever. The goal here is to cast a wide net around players that might be on the table for us. It's not to settle anything like "Was Player X better than Player Y" ...we'll get to that.

3. A panel of participants will volunteer (which is the nature of this thread, just to gauge that interest) a list of their Top X Penguins of all time based on their "current" feelings. No projection is given. It's based on what they did as of the day the list was submitted.

X is to be determined. I think anything between top 25 and top 50 Penguins of all time would be viable. If we were just content to do Top 25, then I'd ask for a list of your top 30 players. If we did top 40, I'd ask for a list of your top 50. If we did top 50, I'd ask for your top 60.

Players will be given a point value based on the order that they are in on the participants' lists. i.e. in a top 50 list, your first player is worth 50 points, second player is worth 49 points...50th player is worth 1 point.

I'd total the points and use that as our aggregate list.

4. The Top X (probably 5 to 7) players from the list will then be put into a discussion thread. That thread is where we'll really drill down on those 5 to 7 players. This is where we begin to make cases for players or against players. This is where you want as much information as you can get out there.

At the end of a week, we'll do a vote. You'll send me a list of the order in which you believe those top 5-7 players belong. I'll tally up those votes and barring any irregularities we'll take the top 3, possibly 4 players in voting. They go on to our final list.

Then the players that did not make the final list from the first vote are added to the next chunk of players from our preliminary list to get us back to a 5 to 7 player chunk...and we repeat the process until we reach our desired number of players on the final list.

If done correctly, I have no doubt that it would be most the comprehensive and accurate list that's ever been created.

Many of you who were apart of different project long ago - the All-Time Draft - may recall that..this isn't that because there's no roster building element to it. But there are some minor similarities. https://www.letsgopens.com/viewtopic.php?t=60027 (can you believe that was 12 years ago?).

Happy to answer any questions here...not offended if there's no interest because most people don't find hockey history as fascinating as I do...

[Gaucho]

that was 12 years ago

what

[mikey]

Right? That was in 2012. The neckmeat era...

[Gaucho]

jesus

[MR25]

I remember the all time thing but could've sworn that was like... 2014 (which, 10 years vs 12... still longer than I thought lol).

So I understand the panel thing correctly, are we aggregating the discussion into our own list, or would it just be our opinion?

Hypothetical example: let's say I have Kovalev, Straka, Gonchar, Wregget, and Jiri Slegr in my personal 6-10 (yes, this is just an extreme example). When providing that list to you as a panelist, am I putting that exact 6-10 despite someone pointing out that maybe Larry Murphy deserves to be in that range, or should I be taking the Larry Murphy comment/discussion into account?

[mikey]

I would hope that the discussion helped to "smooth" your opinion out a bit, right? The idea is that capable folks are bringing some useful points to the conversation.

For me, I'll probably end up making a case for a lot of the pre-Lemieux guys...I imagine I've seen them more than 99% of the board at this point. So, you might come into it going, "well, I have Kovy, Straka, Gonchar, Wregget, and Slegr in my 6-10 spots...but mikey shows that there's really no justification for me to have Slegr over Burrows...it's all the things I like about Slegr, except Burrows was better and more impactful. So, now I have Burrows in my 10 slot...and I'll bump Slegr down a bit."

But the prelim discussion and the prelim lists that come after that is really just a "feel" thing...just so that players "come up" in a reasonable order and the whole thing becomes more digestible.

Like...if we just took the waterfall approach, all hell breaks loose after the Mt. Rushmore of this team basically. It's drinking from a firehose. But with the prelim discussion and the aggregate list, there's some order to the process...

"Ok, 66, 68, 87, 71 are all on the board...now, we get to discuss (purposefully wrong answers here as to not bias anything) Morozov, Bathgate, Laukkanen, and Skudra."

As opposed to, "Ok those guys are on the board...................any idea who goes next? We have the choice of everyone that's ever played here for 60 years."

tl;dr: Your prelim list is probably only going to be minorly influenced - it should be. And then your round 2 votes are where you really want to challenge your own opinions and get it "right"...

[MR25]

Got it. I figured there was going to be some wiggle room on the lists between panelists (like a one or two spot difference for some guys) based on the vote scoring system but wasn't sure how much you wanted the discussion to influence the choices.

[Gaucho]

Why not start with preliminary lists?

[mikey]

Why not start with preliminary lists?

I expect only a handful of panelists, and if the prelim lists vary too much, we might get boxed out from a better final list.

In place of vetting lists to curtail bias (i.e. if someone submitted a list with no Russians on it, or no players before 1984, etc.), I'll take all lists (reasonably) at their word in good faith...but in place of that, I think some prelim discussion about the process, about players that some might not be totally familiar with, etc. would help to ultimately deliver a better product...

As opposed to sort of "blindsiding" folks for a complete list and then end up in a situation where we HAVE to vote German Titov over Jean Pronovost because Pronovost wasn't high enough on enough prelim lists...

[Gaucho]

gotcha

[meow]

in

whatever role you need me to play

[mikey]

in

whatever role you need me to play

Love that <3

[King Colby]

Yeah I'd be on the panel but definitely want the discussion first since I really don't know enough about the pre-mario pens

[Gaucho]

I think preliminary lists would give us a good idea of maybe 25 to 30 guys that are pretty much consensus top 50 players. On the other hand, we wouldn't really need lists for that, would we?

[mikey]

I think you'd be surprised. I don't think you get anything close to consensus there. I don't think you get 50 different names if you ask for a top 30. And if you did, it's because of a singular mention - which is not consensus.

If you want "consensus", you expand beyond the length of your intended final list because then you assure you get names mentioned multiple times. If you ask for a bunch of Top 30's, you might only get - say - Ron Schock one time. But if you ask for top 40, on the route to get to a top 30, you get him on a majority of lists. The difference between 28th and 33rd is negligible, while the difference between 1 out of 8 lists vs 7 out of 8 lists is substantial...

[Lelldorin]

I can submit a list if you think I can contribute. However, It will focus very heavily consist of players from the first Stanley Cup up to now.

To be clear - you want us to rate players for their Penguins career? So Iginla is worth close to 0 even though he is a HoFer...

Edit: It sounds like a lot of work to say that Lemieux is no 1, and then Crosby slightly ahead of Jagr

[mikey]

The more the merrier!

My advice is to make a good faith attempt at learning about some of the pre-1991 Penguins. To be fair, our history is pretty bare behind Lemieux...but there are some quality players back there.

And yeah, just Penguins career...and we'll do a minimum games played to qualify them. I'm thinking that number is going to be in the 150 to 200 regular season games played area. That latter of which assures you three seasons as a Penguin. 150 is a more liberal version of that, and may allow a two-season player to be considered. I think two is too negligible at a glance...so I'd lean towards to 200 probably, maybe with the ability to petition for someone who falls short in the prelim process.

[Rylan]

2 things:
1. I had way too many posts on LGP.
2. Tyler Wright is still a comical pick by me. I stand by Rico Fata though.

[mikey]