Terry Sawchuk, Glenn Hall, and Jacques Plante are the greatest to ever play the game. In the modern era Roy deserves the major credit for bringing the butterfly back after Glenn Hall hade been an outcast for using it. Guys like Hasek, Brodeur, and Vasilevsky have had an easier time in net with the multitude of rule changes and equipment advancement. It’s an easier job and has been since the masks came in and the equipment got massive

I don’t even understand what you’re trying to say? Are you saying the competition today is better than it was with 6 teams? Because that’s flat out wrong. The level of competition has never been matched. You can talk all you want about diets and whatever else you want to mention but it’s utterly pointless. When every player on the ice is all star quality you have harder competition. That’s how it was in that era. That’s never going to happen again

In the 60s, the majority of players had to work other jobs in the offseason to support themselves. Now it’s training year round. Lots of players even outside the NHL have personal trainers, back then, not so many. Way more people play hockey now than in the sixties, and bigger pool of players=more talent at the top. There are more amateur leagues and teams for players to develop from. Players are faster, stronger and more skilled than the sixties. You put the avalanche of last year against any team from the sixties, and the avalanche would dominate.

This is what is so hilarious and annoying about you people of the internet generation, you just assume because of technology and whatever training and equipment of today that somehow magically everyone today is great and players before this modern time were crap. It’s not only arrogant and stupid but ignorant.

Why is everything you said utterly stupid? Because I never once said that players today aren’t in better shape. That’s completely useless to the discussion. You bring it up though over and over. The point of the discussion is not this utter nonsense of “player x couldn’t play today” or “player y would have dominated”. It’s like saying people who lived 200 years ago were stupid because they never went on the internet. That’s essentially what you’re saying.

So let’s get back to what should be very easy comprehend, when you only have 6 pro hockey teams it means only the very best can play in the NHL. If there were only 6 teams right now your 4th liners would be first liners. You’re a Sabres fan I see, Tage Thompson would be a 4th liner instead of a first liner. Most of your team would be in the AHL because they couldn’t make a team in a 6 team league. That’s how stiff the competition was.