Quote:Originally posted by Beaver@Mar 26 2018, 03:18 PM

I do think it's underappreciated just how much "sports science," training, etc has advanced even within our lifetimes and so I tend to agree with you that if 18 year old Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky, etc somehow time traveled to 2005 and entered the league they wouldn't have been nearly as great as they were in their own era. That said, who's to say that if Gretzky was born in 1991 instead of 1961 that he wouldn't have been just as dominant now than he was with a better body of knowledge about diets, training, etc? To me it's important to keep in mind not only the differences in era for scoring (ie: it's much more impressive to score 100 points in 2001 than it was in 1985) but also the advantage that modern players have with more information available to them.

OH no, I absolutely agree.

Due to concepts such as tabula rasa, Gretzky/Orr could be just as good, worse or not play hockey at all had they been born at a later date, but in the interests of the second type of "greatest ever" list I defined earlier, I think that's too much of a liberty to take