:rolleyes:
It seems to me that you can pick and mix stats though to get the required results. Test batting average is not the be-all-and-end-all in cricket. I’m not a huge cricket fan, but was Bradman at his absolute peak as dominant as Lara at his absolute peak, or was he merely more consistent throughout his career? How should we judge Bradman against Sobers, who as well as having the 9th highest test batting average, was also one of the top bowlers of his day.
And so should you. :rolleyes::rolleyes:
So, can we all agree not to refer to games like “football” and “hockey”, but refer instead to games like American football, soccer, field hockey and ice hockey?
If you can get the British to drop the “it’s not soccer, it’s football” line, sure, I’ll endeavor to call ice hockey by the full name. That won’t happen, of course, so maybe you’ll accept my counter-suggestion: when you’re reading a board where there’s a lot of North Americans and Europeans you’ll want to presume that references to hockey probably mean ice hockey, seeing how Wikipedia mentions zero professional field hockey leagues and at least twelve professional and minor ice hockey leagues.
Precisely. Bradman’s test record is in matches between the #1 and #2 ranked teams in the world.
It doesn’t include games when they ran the score up against the #30th ranked new expansion franchise.
Now you are getting closer to the mark … so count only his games for the Canadian national side, against the USSR, or USA or Sweden or Finland national teams, over a 20 year career and if his goal scoring/assists/defensive/win-loss etc record is 4.4 standard deviations above the mean of his peers, then he’s the equivalent of Bradman.
Ah the old US-isolationist view of the incontrovertible and absolute superiority of US professional sports over . I thought that Rondembo was no longer with us.
Adolfo “Dolfi” Cambiaso is a very handy 10 goal polo player. I’d bet that his “athleticism and talent” would be the equivalent of the #1 ranked player in any other international sport.
By that reasoning, the best girdiron team in the world is Japan’s national team. Do you believe that? IFAF World Championship - Wikipedia
Bobby Orr is Canadian. Seems to me that what we’re dealing with is not American snobbery, but plain ignorance about a major professional sport and an attempt to exclude great athletes from consideration by cherry picking the criteria.
That’s great, but not what I was talking about. Do you reckon that the great financial rewards to be found in some professional sports will generally attract better talent? To return to the hockey example, which team is going to have better players, in your opinion: the Australian Olympic ice hockey team, which plays internationally, or the Florida Panthers, which only plays in the NHL (and is currently at the bottom of the points ranking)?
Yes, the US isolationist viewpoint of “a sports league that has a minority of American players is the best in the world.” What do you know about the NHL?
If the Straight Dope was based in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth or Brisbane, I (and a couple others) would not have gone rolleyes on bldysabba’s comment.
But I (and others) found it interesting that ICE hockey wasn’t included and just wanted to know where Gretzky would fall in that comparison. Understand that I am by no means diminishing Bradman’s uniqueness (it is a quite awesome achievement, btw) nor snubbing the sport of cricket, just questioning ICE hockey’s absence in the OP’s link that did include two other North American born sports…baseball and basketball.
Sounds like you are confusing the title with the status, the old “US baseball is the best 'cause we play the World Series” gambit.
???
Might also pay a couple of million to get 300lb (barely) moving speed bumps who are classified as footballers despite never touching the ball with either hand or foot. It that’s the skills the market demands and pays for, all hale to them. Some NFL teams have been recruiting the odd Australian Rules football player as their punter e.g. Darren Bennett, Ben Graham, Sav Rocca. They are earning more money now post retirement from Aussie Rules, but don’t believe for a second that these are the best Aussie Rules players, or even were the best when in their prime.
The Australian Ice Hockey team comprises primarily of expatriot Canadians, curiously like most of the US based teams of the NHL.
The Australian (field) hockey team are the current holders of the Champions Trophy. They won that in 2012 against the Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany, Belgium, England, India and Pakistan. The Champions Trophy is played each year between the world’s top 8 ranked teams (excluding Spain in 2012 who were invited but couldn’t attend). That’s a reasonably valid claim to be best in the world, and that ranking is going to be challenged each year.
But for the OP, do they have any statistically dominant player? Jamie Dwyer has been ranked best in the world five times in the past decade. That’s a subjective assessment but notwithstanding he’s nowhere near The Don’s outperformance v his peers.
Hmm let’s see.
I’m an (ex) 1st grade standard field hockey player, so I know the basics of stick skills, positions, attacking and defensive strategy … but I’ve never been ice skating.
Without the old Google I’d struggle to name more than 5 NHL franchises.
I don’t know who won the 2012 Stanley Cup, (Los Angeles?) but I do know you play for the Stanley Cup.
So bugger all really, but I’d back dollars to donuts that I know a squillion more about NHL than you know about any non-US professional sport.
Ok. So what? Defensive non sequitur much?
I asked because you were being defensive and insulting other posters in this thread because you made assumptions that are very much factually incorrect.
(If soccer counts as a non US professional sport you’re wrong, btw.)
Another thing to remember about Bradman’s figures is that we are purely talking about his performance in the national team playing against national teams from other countries. His performances in the interstate competition (where his average was 110) are not included.
To me that makes comparisons harder. Is it fair to compare a player’s international career with another player’s domestic career? I don’t have a firm opinion one way or the other, but let’s take examples like English soccer/football players George Best and David Beckham. Should we look at their perfomances in the English League or just their international appearances? Even more so, what about Michael Jordan, Gretsky, or a baseball player?
In addition to Bradman and Lindrum, I’ll put out the name of another Australian sportsperson, Heather McKay. She played squash throughout the '60s and '70s and lost just two matches (one in 1960 and one in 1962). She was undefeated for almost 20 years from then on, for the rest of her career. In her 17 consecutive British Open titles she lost only two games (no matches). She won the 1968 final without losing a single point, and in the finals for each of the next two years only lost two points.
Reminds me of Jahangir Khan too. 555 matches unbeaten, I wonder how that works, statistically. Ed Moses is another outlier, in a sport that is very athletic.
Essentially, the international criteria you’re demanding are not the criteria in the analysis that the OP sets forth. Of the four team sports listed, Babe Ruth would have never played internationally, Michael Jordan’s international career was comprised of two Olympics games and qualifiers, and the bulk of Pele’s statistics were compiled in club play. Demanding to concentrate on international play from a single sport is unreasonable.
In most sports, league competition is of a higher quality than international competition. Jordan played in two Olympic games: 1984 and 1992. In 1984, the team consisted of college players and won all of their games in blowouts. Margins of victory were 48, 21, 36, 58, 33, 11, 19, and 31. The 1992 situation was worse: margins were 79, 44, 60, 41, 38, and 47 in qualifying play, and then 68, 43, 33, 44, 41, 38, 51, and 32 in the games proper. Do you truly think that there was better competition in international play?
You complain about padding statistics against inferior competition, but it’s worth noting a few things. First, most teams go deeper into their bench in blowout wins, to protect against injury to their stars. Secondly, every star in the league has the same opportunities to pad their stats. Thirdly, Gretzky’s best stats were compiled in an era where the NHL only had 21 teams and the talent level was consistently rising as the play quality in American feeder leagues improved and Eastern European players started to move to the NHL. Finally, his top years were when he was playing on an expansion team himself. In fact, he played for a team that was intentionally penalized on admission to the league so that they could keep Gretzky.
Which only goes to show that the ice hockey supporters in this thread are hardly pushing the Gretzky analysis for patriotic reasons. Gretzky was a Canadian player who came to fame on a Canadian-based team playing in a sport with a Canadian culture.
But most of all, I tend to get pissed off by people who take potshots at Americans for being parochial while demonstrating even more provincialism themselves. Yes, I slipped and said “hockey” rather than “ice hockey,” but that’s because the terms are synonymous in the snow belt of North America.
Americans are justifiably blasted for criticizing soccer because they don’t know the sport. The reverse holds here as well. For example, any time I have ever heard an American use the term “footballer”, they were referring to the EPL. More to the point, you better have a hell of a head start before criticizing an offensive lineman for being a speed bump. They may be 300+ lbs, but their sprint results are still comparable to an average man.
You are absolutley right. The Dutch, Germans, Spainiards, British probably means Ice Hockey when they say “Hockey”.:rolleyes:
[QUOTE=President Johnny Gentle]
Yes, I slipped and said “hockey” rather than “ice hockey,” but that’s because the terms are synonymous in the snow belt of North America.
[/QUOTE]
Well, this thread is not exclsuively populated by people in the North American snow belt is it? There is a world East of Maine, West of California and South of the Rio Grande you know.
Jahnigir was undefeated for 5 successive years. But, he was eventually surpassed as a player by Jansher Khan before the end of his career. Doid that happen to anyone else who has been mentioned here as an outlier?
Yep any time they have to change the rules to stop a player seems to indicate he was pretty good.
If you had Don Bradman or Walter Lindrum on your team you would have been odds on favorite to win every time.
Is that what I said? Sorry, what I meant to say was:
Ice hockey actually has professional leagues not only in North America but also in Europe, much unlike field hockey, which apparently has none anywhere. While I’ve never seen a thread devoted to field hockey on this (or any other) message board, ones about ice hockey appear regularly. It appears that any post that has the words “hockey” and “Wayne Gretzky” is probably about the kind of hockey that involves ice, and not the equally-valid but not as popular kinds.
You think the Rio Grande is the border of the snowbelt quick I must use rolleyes emoticon for devastating effect.
No wait, that would be stupid.
The terminology isn’t too important (but as a UK person if I hear hockey with no qualifier then I’ll assume it is played on grass)
Anyhow, on the subject on the competitive level being discussed I think it is difficult to make exact comparisons across sports but we should at least be able to say that the stats we are comparing are set at the highest level of competition within a given sport and that there is a decent enough pool of talent to make the outlier significant.
This does weaken the claim of women and minority sports players in my eyes but there you go.
All I know of Bradman and Gretzky suggest that indeed that is the case. for them. I favour Bradman but I have no absolute criteria for doing so.