The Hockey 100: The Story of the 100 Greatest NHL Players in Modern History
By Sean McIndoe & Dan Robson, with The Athletic Hockey Staff
William Morrow; hardcover; $45.00; available today, Tuesday, October 27th
The Athletic has created the world's largest sports newsroom, with its trademark being a focus on deep reporting, expert analysis, and unmatched journalism. A part of The New York Times Company, its breadth of coverage can be found on their website and in their Sports section in their daily newspaper.
Sean McIndoe is a national NHL columnist for The Athletic, for whom he has covered hockey since 2018. Based in Ottawa, he has written for Grantland, ESPN, and Sportsnet in Canada. He is a lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan who is known for blending his extensive hockey knowledge with sharp humor.
Dan Robson is a Senior Writer at The Athletic, which he also joined in 2018 after seven years with Sportsnet. He is a National Magazine Award and National Newspaper Award winner, and the author of several books.
The Hockey 100 is their ranking of the greatest hockey players in the modern era, from 1967 on, as that was the season the NHL expanded from the Original Six, of which the Rangers are one, to 12 teams and grew into the 32-team behemoth it is now.
"The way the game was played began to change, evolving through the hard-hitting 1970s to today's emphasis on speed and skill," McIndoe and Robson write. "The NHL went from a league dominated by Canadians to one with more and more American stars, and then European, and eventually all around the world." Focusing on the last sixty years also encompasses "the high-scoring era of the 1970s and '80s to the Dead Puck Era that followed," a reference to the 1990s.
Within their top 100 players are 80 Hockey Hall of Famers, 7- Stanley Cup champions, and 32 Conn Smythe Trophy winners, the award given for the MVP of the playoffs. There are also 30 Hart Trophy winners, given to the league MVP; 19 Norris Trophy winners, for the best defenseman; and 13 Vezina Trophy winners, for top goaltender. There are also 37 Olympic gold medalists, and 10 different nationalities represented.
In addition to it ranking the best to ever play hockey, this is a deep history of the game, as their extensive research and interviews produced angles and stories that give a new lens to the game's most compelling characters, starting with "The Great One," Wayne Gretzky to Mark Messier, Martin Brodeur, Bobby Orr, Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin.
Messier is most known here for leading the Rangers to a Stanley Cup championship in 1994, their first in 54 years. He won five other Cups with the Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s, where he played along with Gretzky before they reunited for one year in New York, where they nearly won another Cup together for the Rangers in 1997.
In addition, Messier won a Conn Smythe Trophy and two Hart trophies, and as McIndoe and Robson write, "his legacy as a leader is such that the league put his name on its leadership award."
Messier also stood out for something most hockey fans will remember it vividly, as they write, "Perhaps it was the look in his eye, the intimidation factor, the sheer force of will. Maybe it was the bone-crushing body checks and the well-earned comparisons to Gordie Howe. Something about Messier transcends his list of accomplishments - the blazing speed, the strength to bulldoze defensemen, the hands to attack anyone one-on-one, and the wrist shot he launched from either foot to fool even the best goaltenders of his era."
Brodeur, who played most of his career with the New Jersey Devils, was part of perhaps the greatest goaltending era in hockey history in the 1990s into the 2000s, along with other Hockey 100 members like Patrick Roy, Dominik Hasek, Ed Belfour, and Henrik Lundqvist.
Where Brodeur set himself apart is he was possibly the best ever when it came to stickhandling. He is the only goalie in NHL history to score three goals, and his passing ability was a huge advantage, as forecheckers had a hard time picking it up, and led to a notable rule change.
Brodeur was one of the faces of a Devils team whose coach, Jacques Lemaire, employed the neutral zone trap to perfection, as they shut down high-flying offenses of the '90s like the Detroit Red Wings and Philadelphia Flyers on the way to the Devils three Stanley Cups.
Lemieux has the distinction of saving his Pittsburgh Penguins from bankruptcy, and became the only player-owner in the NHL through money that was owed to him through unpaid contracts. He also battled Hodgkin's lymphoma, and on the day of his last treatment, he flew to Philadelphia for their game that night against the Flyers. That night began the Penguins' 17-game winning streak in the 1992-93 season, which is a still a record to this day.
Bobby Orr, the legendary Boston Bruins defenseman, played his first year as a junior at age 14, before he was even in high school or could have a driver's license. He became the youngest player to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame at just 31 years old.
Alexander Mogilny, who won a Stanley Cup for the Devils in 2000, and also played for the Buffalo Sabres, Vancouver Canucks, and Toronto Maple Leafs, was the first Soviet player to be recruited to a team in the United States at a time when the USSR blocked its players from being exported. He needed to sneak off to Sweden to discuss his prospects, and that led to two hockey club executives to go into hiding after they were convinced they were being followed and had their calls traced.
Ken Hitchcock, a member of the 2023 Hockey Hall of Fame who led the Dallas Stars to a Stanley Cup Championship in 1999, and also coached the Philadelphia Flyers, St. Louis Blues, Edmonton Oilers, and Columbus Blue Jackets, wrote the Foreword for this book.
"To look up and down that list is to marvel at players who not only excelled at this game but reshaped it and, in some cases, dramatically changed it," Hitchcock writes. "Players who all had the same relentless competitive spirit and yet were all dramatically different and special. You just see the names and smile.
"For me, it's a feeling of real gratitude. I was given a front-row seat to watch many of these players prepare themselves to play every day at the highest level, not just physically, but mentally, and under some very difficult and demanding circumstances. I saw them bleed and sweat and cry, and I beamed with joy and pride as they lifted each other and eventually lifted the hardest trophy to earn in all of sports, the Stanley Cup.
"I was fortunate enough to coach 40 of the great players on this list, either as an assistant coach or head coach in the junior ranks, the NHL, or international competitions, including the 2014 Olympics. I've coached against 86 of the players. I know I took away so much from each experience. To think that maybe I helped them along their journey, if only a little bit, is a thrill.
"I get asked all the time what it was like to coach great players. It was mostly easy, to be honest, because they didn't need any help. They were so good and such good self-starters that most days they didn't need any coaching. You never had to worry about whether they were ready to play or if they knew the importance of a game. You just didn't worry about that stuff...
"The great players elevate the game. They see it in a different way and then teach us a new way to watch it. In some cases, they literally change how the game is played going forward. That's really an amazing legacy, if you think about it."
The Hockey 100 is the latest in a series of books from The Athletic examining the best athletes in history, after The Soccer 100 (please click here for our review), The Basketball 100 (our review), and and The Football 100 (our review).
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