I hate to throw out another of these on the impression that I'll have them all into the 1990s; admittedly, I only have the goods for this draft class and the previous one. The goods in question this time come from The Globe & Mail again, out of Saturday's edition June 11th, 1988.

Keep in mind that, because this is the sequel, it won't be nearly as good...kind of like the 1988 NHL Draft Class, except not really because (according to my measure of "success," aka 500+ NHL games) NHL teams batted .800 in the first 10 picks. Wowsers. In fact, 7 of the top 10 played 1,000+ NHL games. Ay carumba.

To quote Meet Joe Black, now you're going to pee some more: the #10 pick, Teemu Selanne, has played more NHL games than the following 11 picks combined. Apparently they didn't think too highly of 4th round picks Mark Recchi, Tony Amonte, or Rob Blake. No, they wanted Reggie Savage, Kory Kocur, and Winnipeg's own Kevin Cheveldayoff. The bums.

Oh, you're going to love what they said about Mike Modano and Jeremy Roenick...

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The year was 1988. Stephen Hawking had just written his best-selling book A Brief History of Time. Gasoline was only .91 cents a gallon. Miami Sound Machine had recently released Dr. Beat and Gloria Estefan was in her sexual prime. Had I been a teenager in the mid-eighties, I would have done The Conga with Gloria on the regular. Life was good. Times were simple.

In 1988, Sergei Pryakhin was a fresh faced 25 year old trying to start anew in a strange and foreign country. Pryakhin you see, was a professional athlete. He was also the sole Russian born hockey playing hockey in the NHL.

The term "playing hockey" in this case should be applied loosely as the act was performed sparingly; Pryakhin suited up only twice for the Calgary Flames that year. By 1991, he was no more than an afterthought, amassing 46 games and marking a minuscule 11 points (3G, 8A). Only three years in the league, his career had been truncated.

Such was life for Russian hockey players in North America.

Before Pryakhin, Victor Nechayev was the NHL's most recent Russian, dressing in only 3 NHL games for the 1982-83 Los Angeles Kings. By the end of the 1983-84 season, he was out of hockey completely.

In the forty-two years between 1946 and 1988, Pryakhin and Nechayev were the only Eastern European Soviet born players to register game-play in the NHL.

With that being said, the leagues landscape was in for a drastic shift during the early 1990's. Over the next decade, the NHL saw the greatest infusion of talent in its longstanding history. Droves of Europeans -- predominantly from post-communist countries -- were lining up for the chance to become hockey's next superstar.

And it all started with one defection.

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Sometimes, when you're farting around on the web you unearth a gem. This is one of those times.

A number of you might know I was snooping around for old pre-draft rankings for years before 1998. After a couple hundred clicks (and the good fortune of working at a university with access to a Lexis Nexus database) I was able to unearth truncated versions of the NHL's Central Scouting Bureau's scouting reports for the top 21 prospects in the 1987 NHL Draft, as reported in The Globe & Mail June 6th, 1987 (Saturday edition). That draft class featured a triumvirate of 500-goal scorers in the 1st round (Pierre Turgeon, Brendan Shanahan, Joe Sakic) as well as two defencemen who went on to play more than 1,400 games (Glen Wesley, Luke Richardson). No 1st round before or since can make that claim.

For each of the selections, I want to cherry-pick the quotes a bit and focus on the negative comments on players I consider a "success" (500+ games in the NHL), as well as the positive comments on those who played less than 500 games. I'll keep them in the order that CSB placed them.

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After my initial post on the impact of curved blades, I forged ahead looking at game footage of what I refer to as the "heightened game" (meaning, the game after curved blades). Yet there was one thing that was interesting to me, particularly in regards to shooting. Yes, there were more "drag-and-snap" snap shots being taken in the 1980s, and yes curved blades were prevalent, ditto saucer passes (among the better teams), ditto off-the-glass dump-ins. But there was one thing that didn't seem to come around in the 1980s, and it involves where mama keeps the cookies.

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One of the perks of NHL Gamecentre (plug! plug!!!) is that you also have the opportunity to access the "NHL Vault", which includes a number of games from nearly every season dating back to the late 1950s. Gabe sent me out on a mission to look at some things within those games, but in the process I couldn't help but observe a number of other things as well. One of the big ones: Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, and the infamous curved blade. We talk a lot about how the expansion era changed the game, how Bobby Orr changed the game, how training's changed the game, but you could make a fair argument that - in one fell swoop - Hull and Mikita popularized an innovation that might have had just as much of an impact as anything else. Before jumping into this headfirst, you really have to see the curve on this thing...

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Most of us know the story now - Edmonton Oilers stick boy dreams big, stays small, forges an incredible WHL career (even better than then and future teammate Pat Faloon's!), and breaks into the San Jose Sharks roster at the tender age of 19. After slogging through some horrific teams in San Jose (and after a brief stop with the Edmonton Oilers), he emerges as a legit NHL forward with the Florida Panthers, doing yeoman's work on some marginal teams on his way to where he is now, 23 points away from 1,000. A stats-inclined person should know better than to be so interested in milestones, but things like 1,000 points and 500 goals seem to have the shared respect of many - we know it is difficult to play, and play well enough, to reach those milestones.

We tend to notice the meteors, the players who get to 1,000 in 9 to 12 seasons - certainly I do, because I was quite surprised to look at Whitney's career numbers and realize that he could potentially get to 1,000. Part of my confusion was the result of the way that a lot of fans will look at his numbers:

The players in the category of having neither 50-goal, 60-assist, nor 100-point seasons, yet still accomplishing a 1,000-point career, are few and far between. I think they depict an interesting split - Hall of Famers from an era of average scoring but shorter seasons, and non-Hall of Famers considerably aided by the high-scoring 1980s. Whitney, on the other hand, comes from an era of low scoring in the NHL; does that make him a Hall of Famer? I don't know. But I do know that we can look deeper into Ray Whitney's career to see just how likely his career has been.

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The Boston Bruins are leading the league in both shooting percentage and save percentage, which has left them with the second-best goal differential through 38 games since the lockout (the 2005-06 Ottawa Senators are first at +75.) How does this rank historically? And how does the percentage of total goals scored by them rank?

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by Willy Stower (via upload.wikimedia.org)

Winding down the 1970s, our final brackets are starting to take shape. When all's said and done, we're going to have the finalists ranked by the percentage they earned in the final vote for their decade (there will be 8 finalists total). Right now, Peanuts O'Flaherty has a commanding position in the 1 spot, having earned 42% of the vote in his decade; no other finalist topped 31%. Orland Kurtenbach sits at the 2 seed (31%), Fred Sasakamoose at the 3 (30%), and Dit Clapper rounds out the decades covered so far at the 4 seed (28%). After finishing the 1970s, we are left with three remaining decades, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. So, let's add another Elite 8 member, shall we?

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