Should Cam Neely have been ranked among the NHL’s top 100 players of all time?
Debate the answer with Chad Finn and Boston sports fans at The Sports Q.
COMMENTARYWelcome to Boston.com’s Sports Q, our daily conversation, initiated by you and moderated by Chad Finn, about a compelling topic in Boston sports. Here’s how it works: You submit questions to Chad through Twitter, Facebook, email, his Friday chat, and any other outlet you prefer. He’ll pick one each day (except for Saturday) to answer, then we’ll take the discussion to the comments, where the mission is to have a sports conversation with occasional controversy, but without condescension or contrarianism. Chad will stop by the comments section several times per day to navigate. But you drive the conversation.How is Cam Neely not on the 100. He revolutionized the power forward in hockey. Disgrace. -@pcurran22
Neely may not be a candidate at the moment for the list of the top 100 NHL team presidents of all time, but the only ‘80s athlete more beloved in his time around here was Larry Bird.
Neely was quintessentially Boston, the embodiment of what we want in our star athletes. He was tough and fearless — he’d have made the league as a goon had he never learned to skate and stickhandle at the same time — but maximized every strand of immense talent with the Bruins. I don’t know if he revolutionized what a power forward was, but he sure as heck defined it.
So his was the first name I looked for when the list of the NHL’s top 100 players of all time was released over All-Star weekend. I knew he was a no-doubter for Boston fans who still remember his 50-goals-in-49-games season of 1993-94 like it was much more recent than it really is.
I also wondered whether he was viewed nationally with the same enduring admiration — especially since there’s the perception of him, despite three 50-goal seasons, that he’s more of a what-if because of career-abbreviating injuries that halted his playing days at age 30.
I do wish he was on the list; there haven’t been 50 players who were more fun to watch. And I can’t imagine any Bruins fan who watched them create magic on the same line in the early ‘90s ever figured then that Adam Oates would rate as a top-100 player a couple of decades later while Neely wouldn’t. Oates was … well, he was the Oates to Neely’s Hall.
I get why he didn’t make it, though. His career was just too short — a mere 726 games, though he did cram in 395 goals in that time. Those who did make it sustained their greatness longer. That’s no fault of his. It’s pathetic weasel-on-skates Ulf Samuelsson’s fault. But it’s a factor.
Hey, it’s an impressive list! The best of the best among the best! Penguins magician Evegeni Malkin didn’t make the cut. Neither did Dale Hawerchuk (19th all time in scoring). Some national writers thought Joe Thornton should have made it — none, I suspect, based in Boston.
The one that more or less convinced me that Neely’s omission is justifiable is the exclusion of Jarome Iginla, a power forward in the Neely mold with a much longer run and 617 goals to his name. You want to complain about an ex-Bruin who got robbed, there’s your guy. But I’ll tell you this: Iginla and Neely both belong in the top, oh, 115. If only that were a cooler number.
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