Banni
Rejoint: juin 2018
Messages: 19,215
Mentions "j'aime": 4,837
In the first 3 years only?
I think Malkin was the better player.
Look it's hard to judge this. The game has really changed. There is a huge emphasis on speed now, that wasn't the case when Malkin came into the league. Because of that, he looked so much more dominate that a lot of the other players in the league.
Mathews is going to have most of his career in a different era. It's a track meet out there now. There are better athletes out on the ice, and to be as dominate is a much harder task today than it was 10 years ago. There are also changes in things like goalie equipment and the rules to the game. All those things mess with numbers so I don't really think you can look simply at numbers and I don't think it's really easy to compare to their "peers" because of the qualitative difference there.
What I do know, is that Malkin was the best player on the ice when they won a cup in 09 in his 3rd year. And one could also make the argument he was the best player on the ice the year they lost in 08.
They did that in the salary cap era. With the same sort of challenges TOR has do deal with. And they did it against arguably a better team in Detroit.