The American sports network ESPN’s list of the Top 100 professional athletes of the 21st Century may or may not get it right with most athletes, but it’s dead wrong when it comes to its low ranking of Edmonton Oilers superstar Connor McDavid. ESPN has McDavid ranked 98th out of 100 athletes. He’s just ahead of football player Ed Reed, and just behind cricket star Virat Kohli.
He’s also behind baseball pitcher Pedro Martinez, ranked 92nd, WNBA basketball star A’ja Wilson, 90th, NBA star Kawhi Leonard, 85th, WNBA player Lauren Jackson, 84th, WNBAer Sheryl Swoopes, 81st, MMA fighter George St. Pierre, 76th, WNBAer Lisa Leslie, 74th, WNBAer Candace Parker, 60th, NHLer Alex Ovechkin, 54th, NBAer Steve Nash, 51st, WNBAer Maya Moore, 36th, and WNBAer Tamika Catchings, 34th.
The top 25 will be announced on Thursday, no doubt including Sidney Crosby and a host of WNBA players.
That is two NHL players in the ESPN Top 100 so far, McDavid and Oveckin, and seven WNBA players.
Fascinating!
Who knew that a relatively obscure professional league in the United States (can you name one championship team?) would have so much more representation on the ESPN list than the NHL? It’s almost like ESPN has had some long-standing vested interest in the WNBA (ESPN has broadcast WNBA since the league was founded in 1996).
How did ESPN create its list? “Experts in individual sports were asked to vote to rank the top athletes in their sport since Jan. 1, 2000 (no accomplishments before this date were to be considered). Those votes pared down pools in each sport to lists of 10 to 25 athletes each, which constituted the overall candidate pool for the top athletes of the 21st century so far. Each voter was presented two randomly selected names and asked to pick which one has had the better career in the 21st century. Across repeated, randomized head-to-head matchups, more than 70,000 votes were cast at this stage, and using an Elo rating system, the list was pared down from 262 to 100. That list was then evaluated by a panel of experts for any inconsistencies or oversights, resulting in the top 100 ranking seen here.”
One wonders how many WNBA experts were on that final panel of experts? All of them maybe?
To give ESPN credit, twenty-five years ago, its ESPN SportsCentury project did an OK job ranking the top 100 North American athletes of the 20th century. Michael Jordan came in first, followed by Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Wayne Gretzky. I would have had Muhammad Ali first, given his unparalleled cultural significance, but that’s a fine list.
Where should McDavid have ranked on this 21st Century list? I’ll argue he’s the second best NHL player of this century, still behind Crosby but having caught up to Ovechkin.
Hockey is one of the world’s greatest and most popular sports, so somewhere in the Top 40 for McDavid would have been fitting.
And with all those female WNBA basketball players on the list, it would also have been swell to have the odd female hockey player or two on the ESPN list. Three-time Olympic gold medallist Marie-Philip Poulin would have been a fine pick, or Hayley Wickenheiser, who won four Olympic gold medals for Canada since 2000. Perhaps Wick will be in the Top 25.
Where does the Cult rank McDavid?
The Cult of Hockey has been ranking the greatest players all-time in the NHL since 2008, and has now updated its own list. We base our list on all-time NHL Hart, Conn Smythe and Norris Memorial Trophy voting results.
Like the other lists, the Cult’s ranking relies upon expert opinion but the difference is that the experts who vote on MVP, Norris and Conn Smythe awards aren’t looking far back in time, they are contemporary experts. Hockey reporters and columnists don¹t always get it right when they rank players in any given season, as we saw when Taylor Hall beat out McDavid in 2018 for the Hart Trophy.
But Hart and Conn Smythe votes are based on fresh recollections. The experts also compared players they have recently watched with one another, not against players from a distant era of which the experts may have only sketchy knowledge.
Annual MVP rankings have been seen as an excellent piece of evidence for determining all-time greatness in other sports, such as baseball. “They provide the best record indeed, the best possible record of the value that players are perceived as having at the time they are active,” wrote the renowned baseball analyst Bill James in the Historical Baseball Abstract. “It is a subjective record, compiled by on-the-scene, informed observers. It is not always right, but it deserves respect.”
James argued that no matter how much a sports history buff knows about a past era of the game, that buff can’t know as much as those who actually watched the games, day-in, day-out, and knew well the mannerisms, witticisms, confrontations, friendships, habits, accomplishments, failures and customs of the players of the day.
“That is why I believe that, in evaluating players, much respect should be given to the opinions of the player’s contemporaries, both afield and in the press box (or, for that matter, in the seats). It’s not that they¹re always right; they’re not. The sportswriters of the 1920s were as prone to misjudgments, and outright partisanship, as we are today. But they knew so much more about those players than we do today, or than we ever can.”
The Hart has been awarded every year since 1924.
In the Cult rankings, six players are given “top player points” for each NHL year, with the points going to three forwards, two defencemen and one goalie.
A player earned three points in a season if he finishes first in MVP voting. So Wayne Gretzky, with his nine Hart Trophies, earned 27 of his 37 top player points in that manner. Nathan MacKinnon got three points for his Hart Trophy win this year.
A player earns two points if he finishes second in Hart Trophy voting in the pre-Second World War period. In the post-Second World War period, voters started to under-value defencemen, so in the rankings the winner of the Norris Trophy each year take two points. Nicklas Lidstrom, with his seven Norris Trophy wins, earned 14 of his 20 points that way.
The four other top players according to the Hart Trophy voting in a season also get one point each.
Finally, we award three points to a player every time he wins the Conn Smythe trophy (the NHL does not track voting for second, third, fourth or fifth place finishers for this award). The Smythe has only been awarded since 1965, so for the period before then, the Cult relies on reconciled Conn Smythe Trophy voting, done by a group of hockey historians and experts working with The Hockey News in 2001. This group selected playoff MVPs for each year between 1917 to 1964.
Their process was described by Greatest Hockey Legends in a 2007 post: “A group of heavyweight hockey researchers, back by The Hockey News, looked to change that in 2001. Brian McFarlane, Steve Dryden, Bill Fitsell, Bob Duff and Ernie Fitzsimmons looked to reconcile playoff MVP status prior to 1965. They went through microfilms of newspapers for every season of the playoffs and added more statistics, such as first goals, winners, overtime tallies, assists on winners and goalies saves when available. As well, quotes from coaches of the day and comments by writers covering the games were taken into consideration. Several conference calls were held until the group came up with a definitive answer. Their results are simply fascinating. Players of note include Teeder Kennedy, who, like Patrick Roy, was recognized three times, only Teeder did it in a four year span when the Leafs owned the Cup in the late 1940s.”
What are the finals results? The runaway winner as the all-time best player is Wayne Gretzky. He collected 37 points, while Red Wings great Gordie Howe had 29 points.
Bobby Orr finished in third with 25 points. Rounding out the Top Ten were Mario Lemieux, 21 points, Crosby and Lidstrom, 20 (the two best so far this century), Jean Beliveau and Eddie Shore, 19, McDavid, 17, Maurice Richard and Ray Bourque, 16.
There are four Oilers in the Top 50: Gretzky, McDavid, Messier and Paul Coffey.
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