Where Have the NHL's Days of the Dominant Superstar Gone?

Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr. These names live in the history and record books of the NHL as players who dominated the game of hockey.

Each of these players didn't just make a name for themselves, they imposed their will on the entire league at the drop of a hat and made the NHL look like their own personal playground.

This type of player no longer exists in the NHL. The one guy who owns every other team in the league seems to be a thing of the past.

Why is that?

Skating Ability of the Players

First and foremost, the type of game played in the NHL today is one that is much faster than even 10 years ago, let alone 20 or more.

The speed of the game has made it so that if a player can't skate very well, then he is a liability to his team.

Even the fourth-line grinders and fighters need to be able to skate fast and be agile enough to keep up with the opposition.

In the days of Gretzky and Orr, those guys were set apart from the rest of the players in the league by their unique speed and ability to skate.

Today, if you can't skate, you can't play.

Goalies

Looking at the equipment and technique of the older goalies, you sometimes wonder how any of them were ever able to make a save.

Forget the fact that they weren't wearing a mask, their pads were small and their "catching glove" was little more than an old-time baseball glove.

Today's goalies are physical specimens.

Take a guy like Pekka Rinne. Rinne is 6'5" and 205 pounds. Guys that big just never played the goalie position back in the day.

Not to mention the grace with which these big guys play the game. Their speed and ability to control their limbs is just mind-blowing.

Guys like Rinne didn't play the game during the older eras.

The International Factor

Hockey has always had worldwide appeal, but players like Lemieux and Gretzky who dominated the league almost always came from Canada, or North America at least.

As hockey has grown more and more popular throughout the world, more superstars from other countries have joined the ranks of the NHL, diffusing the talent level a bit.

Players like Teemu Selanne, Peter Forsberg and Sergei Fedorov, to name a few, joined the ranks of the NHL, and the parity level jumped a bit.

Style of Play

Most specifically, the style of play that dominated the NHL up until the lockout contributed to the superstars of previous years.

The neutral-zone trap style of defense was the system that brought the New Jersey Devils to their glory days, and when teams saw how well it worked, they copied it.

Pretty soon everybody was playing the trap, and scoring was way down.

This made it difficult for any single player to separate himself since defense was winning championships.

Even with the more open style that has been present since the lockout, defenses are much tighter than they were in the past.

Conclusion

Hockey is a game that has changed as time has passed.

A game that used to see single players dominate and score at will has become far more about a team's chemistry than about the scoring of one player.

We've seen the last of the days of the super scorers like Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr.

Too many players skate too well, the skill level is higher, the goalies are better, more superstars come from other countries and a more defensive influence on the game are all reasons that the single, dominant superstar no longer exists.