More Team Canada Ratings

I ordered these VHS tapes of the '87 Canada Cup back in the early '90's from an ad in the Hockey News. I think they cost something like 60 bucks back then which was alot for a young punk like me. The three tapes had each of the final three games in their entirety and were well worth the money. Watching these games back as they happened with my friends as bunch of 15 and 16 year old morons is still one of my favourite pre-adult memories.
Anyway, I wanted to apply my player rating system used earlier (for 1972 and 1976 series) to the '87 version of Team Canada. I finally found the game boxscores and away I went. Below is a refresher on how the ratings points are awarded an estimated value to each goal scored in the tournament.
Next is the Team Canada leaders. No suprise that Gretzky and Lemieux dominate, they were in on a majority of goals and most of the important ones. Perhaps a slight suprise is Larry Murphy, currently sporting a giant head and bad hair as an analyst on the NHL Network. He figured in on many important goals and was the decoy third man on the winning goal in Game Three.

I decided to do the ratings for only the four Russia/Canada games (including the 3-3 tie in the last preliminary round game). I rated the Soviet players as well to see if Gretz and Mario were still dominant.

Well, there you have it. #66 and #99 were equally as impressive in the four games versus the Russians. Once again, Murphy is the third highest rated Canadian followed by a cavalcade of commies, (not sure if that's politically correct...what do I care, we won the cold war). The Russians rank seven players higher than the next Canadian, all of them very close in their value of points scored. Perhaps the biggest suprise is d-man Normand Rochefort ranking higher than Bourque and Coffey on the strength of contributing to big goals in games one and two of the finals.
Finally, I ranked Team Canada players for the 2002 Olympics. We see that Joe Sakic indeed deserved the MVP for the tournament, earned mainly with his four points in the gold medal match. It's also interesting to see that probably only two (Iginla for certain, Gagne most likely) of these top eight ranked players will be back for 2010. That is of course unless Special Ed turns into the second coming of Doug Harvey over the next calendar year.

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