[Cali Panthers Fan]

Originally Posted by Plaedo

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I just want to preface this post by saying I almost always enjoy your posts and typically agree with your perspectives.

However, I would find your opinion here more compelling if you had a greater degree of balanced discussion - it just seems biased to meticulously pull out the assets/abilities of Barkov, while dismissing Monahan as a goal scorer and nothing more. If you wanted to have more of a balanced discussion, you could also post clips of Monahan's good positional play, winning face-offs, his shoot-out moves, etc.

I didn't feel the need to go through it all because most Flames fans are aware of Monahan's game, but few have seen Barkov more than a handful of times. I felt it warranted a more detailed description of the player he is. All anyone has to do around here to see a highlight package of Monahan is look at one of AC's videos.

I would submit that being a multi-tool doesn't make a player the best on the ice. Taking over a game and willing it to victory could be an attribute of such a player. While it is hard to answer the question of whether he would be the best player on the ice, since it is hypothetical, it is rare in the NHL to have one player always/almost always be the best player on the ice that they skate on. Even Crosby isn't always. When you get a player that "takes over" a game it usually doesn't matter how well his teammates are playing, or the opposing team, they become the best player and stand out in a good way every time they are on the ice. I'm thinking along the lines of Karlsson, Price, Crosby... Iginla in his heyday.

I feel like that clip of the comeback against the Rangers illustrates that pretty well, no?

Bringing this back on topic, it's hard to say that Barkov would be the best player on the ice, when he is ranked in the second tier of the THN article. If you use their methodology from the article to account for the many statistical categories involved in two-way play, then there is a whole tier of players that could be the best player on the ice, even on a Barkov team.
To "gut-check" this... I could easily see Subban, Crosby, McDavid, Karlsson, Giordano, Holtby, etc. taking over a game to the extent that it didn't much matter how well Barkov played, or how the other teammates are playing. For these listed players it is somewhat easy to think of examples of when it has happened before.

Maybe, but Monahan isn't even ranked and the comparison was between the two players.

The next question is how consistently they drive the play of the game to such an extent when they are on the ice, because a player could take over sporadically or do it consistently. One could make an argument, based on the past year, that Hamilton, Giordano, and even Backlund would be the best players on the ice, or that it is at least inconclusive, in comparison to Barkov.

So my point is, no matter how much we watch each game of hockey, and despite our attempts at being objective, everyone still has a bias. Statistical analysis attempts to remove this, but it is also imperfect still.

On a side note, and I realize this is conjecture, but I think some positions have a greater capacity to take over a game than others, but these positions also come with a higher degree of exposure. (Maybe the heirarchy is goalies, defencemen, centres, then wingers?) When Price is playing other-worldly, it doesn't much matter how well the defensemen are or are not playing, nor the centres or wingers, because Price is controlling the game. It's almost a neutralizing effect. Likewise, when Karlsson is on-point both defensively and offensively, the effects of the forwards are lessened (on both teams). Or when Crosby is backchecking but also creating chance after chance, his effect on the game is greater than the snipe-show that Ovechkin attempts to perform, since he's being stick lifted every second chance.

I agree with all this.