https://deadspin.com/these-are-the-most-overrated-nhl-players-since-1990-be-1842868719
Here it is, "The Hockey Players You Think Are Good Are Actually Bad." Sam Fels is on the case, so I'm surprised it's not just "all of them, all of them are Actually Bad, the only good thing is the NBA." It's in the single most indulgent and unreadable format, the "post the transcript of a group chat and call it an article" format. Both The Ringer and the other Gawker sites love to crap these out, laboring under the misconception that their writers' conversations are so interesting that we readers would be blessed if only we could be a virtual fly on their virtual wall. They think they're giving us the Algonquin Round Table. What they're really giving us are a thousand line breaks and people saying "Yeah.", "Wow.", and "Well anyway." Imagine selling a book that was just printouts of this board. You can't, it would be unreadable shit. But in the case of "The Most Overrated NHL Players Since 1990," they have to do it this way, because if you didn't do it that way, then oops, you wrote a listicle, and if you wrote a listicle, oops, you're Bleacher Report. People aren't supposed to know that New Deadspin
is Bleacher Report.
The first one is Martin Brodeur, which, sure, everyone on the internet been up Brodeur's ass for having played behind the NZT for, oh, twenty years now. This is followed by Brett Hull, which is asinine, and to Fels's credit, he pushed back on it. One of the other guys suggested that Hull only had his best seasons because he played with Craig Janney, which is kind of like saying that Patrick Kane only won the MVP because his center was Artem Anisimov. Then comes Jaromir Jagr, the argument for which I have no patience to even skim.
After Brodeur and two of the best scorers of all time comes, you guessed it, Brad Marchand, because this is still nominally Deadspin, so they have to complain about Boston players being overrated. Deadspin Math says that denigrating a well-liked-enough top-six wing for Boston is just as incendiary, if not more incendiary, than denigrating Brett Hull.
Then comes Jonathan Toews. I've been up and down on Toews, but one of the arguments here is that Claude Giroux is better. Giroux is a fine player, but even I'm not going to pretend Toews was not instrumental in winning the Stanley Cup three times. Come on.
Draisaitl (this is an issue?), Getzlaf and Perry (yes and yes), Marian Gaborik (no one overrates Gaborik, no one even remembers him), Shea Weber (who cares), didn't read, too hard to read.
PK Subban is identified as overrated by Jesse Spector and Sam Fels, two of the people who have been doing most of the overrating all along.
Quote:
SF: He’s a victim of both Southern and hockey ideology in Nashville, which is when something goes wrong, just blame the black guy.
This is interesting to me, because the Hockey Twitter hivemind has always championed the Southern markets as Actually Good and the Canadian ones as Actually Bad when it comes to racism, analytics, and everything -- look how they all rubbed their dicks raw to the Carolina Hurricanes doing funny dances after they won games. The prevailing wisdom was that Subban was finally going to thrive in a new-growth Southern market after being blamed for everything in the single most hidebound Canadian market (and a French Canadian one at that: they're
superracist!), because Sun Belt fans are internet-savvy and liberal and not tied to hockey's regrettable past.
What happened? Same thing as in Montreal: everyone loves The PK Subban Show until the team struggles and everyone gets tired of his shit. So when your act wears thin on a losing team in Montreal, it was Canadian racism. When your act wears thin on a losing team in Nashville, now it's Southern racism. What's it gonna be when they get sick of him in Newark? Italian racism? Like the '76 Bucs who lost at home and on the road, he's running out of places to play.
I'm gonna do the ultimate meta-bullshit cop-out and say what's really overrated is the ceremony of declaring players overrated, especially any of the last thirty years, when media saturation has been so high and so many opinions have been published, whether necessarily or not, that every professional athlete of note exists in perfect statis between overrated and underrated. I noticed up at the top that they did this for the NBA, too. I won't even bother with that.
Brett Hull has 741 career goals ( 4th all time) but yeah , TOTALLY overrated. ( Craig Janney ??
) . Im surprised Fels hasnt gone with Subban being mediocre is the result of him being forced to smack a black puck around a rink for years on end and its caused him PTSD cuz blacks were slaves once.