WE SHOULD NEVER FORGET JUST HOW GOOD ORR WAS
Brilliant defenceman did things in his short career that have never been duplicated
Bobby Orr played his last great hockey in the 1976 Canada Cup tournament and it's far too easy to forget, looking back, that happened 48 years ago.
Orr won his first NHL scoring title in 1970 as the first and then later the second defenceman in hockey history to win an Art Ross Trophy. The first came 54 years ago.
At the height of his brilliance, in an unmatched six-year period, Orr scored 734 points, finished first in NHL scoring twice, second three times, third once. Most of that coming more than 50 years ago.
And why does of any of that matter now? Because at All-Star Weekend in Toronto, when the subject of Sidney Crosby's place in hockey history was being discussed and debated by younger chroniclers of the sport in the media room, it was remarkable to me how many influencers in the game had little idea of everything and anything Orr had accomplished in hockey.
So many never saw him play. Unless you're 60 or older there's a chance you didn't see enough of him. And those of us who witnessed history sometimes take for granted that we did.
It was like a getting a chance to watch Jim Brown or Johnny Unitas play football. Or a chance to watch Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle in centre field.
No matter what definitions you choose — modern statistics, old statistics, analytics — Orr is the greatest player of my lifetime. And for reasons mostly unexplained, too many people don't seem to know that.
It wasn't just what he did. It was how he lapped the field.
The year before Orr entered the NHL, Pierre Pilote led all defencemen in scoring with 36 points. Orr scored more than that as a teenage rookie. By his fourth season, at the ages of 21 and 22, he led the NHL with 120 points.
Jim McKenny and Carol Vadnais tied for second in scoring among defenders in 1970. They were 76 points behind Orr.
And in what was probably Orr's greatest individual season, he finished second in scoring with 139 points, and with a record-breaking plus-minus number of +124.
Nicklas Lidstrom, quite possibly the second best defenceman in history, who came to the NHL decades later, had his best plus-minus season at +50. Paul Coffey, the greatest scoring defenceman after Orr, had his best season with the dynastic Oilers finishing at +61.
In the famous six-year period, Orr totalled out at +426. Next on the NHL list at that time, not from his powerhouse Boston team, was Montreal's Serge Savard at +193. You can disregard plus-minus all you want, but when your numbers blow away the field, by itself that was more than telling.
Orr had 135 points when the great Denis Potvin had 76. He had 122 when perennial second place Norris finisher, Brad Park, had 82. He had 101 when Guy Lapointe had 54.
In total, only six NHL defencemen have managed 100 points in a season, many of those years happening in goal-happy seasons. Hall of Famers Potvin, Al MacInnis and Brian Leetch have each had one 100-point season. Erik Karlsson had 100-points last season playing shinny in San Jose. Coffey, who was blessed to play alongside Wayne Gretzky in Edmonton and Mario Lemieux in Pittsburgh had five 100-point scoring seasons — all of them on teams with Gretzky or Lemieux.
But unlike Orr, Coffey was never close to being the best scorer in hockey.
In Coffey's best seven seasons in succession, he accumulated 735 points, 155 points ahead Ray Bourque, 233 ahead of MacInnis.
In Orr's best six seasons, he had 734 points, more than twice as many points as Park (388).
Orr was basically done at the age of 28, with his knees giving out and surgery nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today. He played nine full years, won eight Norris Trophies, three Hart Trophies, a rookie of the year, two scoring titles and two Conn Smythe Trophies as playoff MVP.
He turns 76 next month. Being old enough to have seen him at his best — and on that great Canada Cup team of 1976, when we were still discovering international hockey — is one of the great sporting pleasures of my life.