Quote:
Originally Posted by Dion
I don't know about that. He had 6 seasons of 20+ goals while in the NHL. The WHA wasn't that bad a league as a lot of good NHL players jumped to the rival league for the money. In fact one the best lines ever in hockey was in the WHA.... Bobby Hull, Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg of the Winnipeg Jets.
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True the WHA attracted some top notch players, but it also ran with a bunch of hasbeens and neverwillbes who could not make it in the NHL. There was a huge drop off from the top 3 or 4 players on each team to the rest of their team mates.
Here are all the guys that were the leading scorer for the WHA at one point or another:
Andre Lacroix - .61 ptsPG in NHL, 1.45 in WHA
Marc Tardif - .77 in NHL, 1.49 n WHA
Mike Walton - .76 in NHL, 1.33 in WHA
The only one on the list to have some similar success in the NHL was Real Cloutier - 1.09 in the NHL, 1.53 in WHA
How about this...leading scorers in the first WHA season:
Lacroix, Ron Ward, Danny Lawson, Bobby Hull, Norm Beaudoin, Tom Webster, Chris Bordeleau, Terry Caffery, Gord Labossiere, and Wayne Carleton. If you are scratching your head on most of those names (other than Hull of course), it's because they could not star in the NHL, but they flourished against weak players in the WHA.