Who is the greatest Stanley Cup champion of all-time?

Greg Wyshynski
Red Wings are champions
Red Wings are champions

The NHL has added a couple of features to NHL.com recently that are fun if you have an affinity for nostalgia and/or a significant amount of time to waste.

The first is the continuation of the League’s plan to digitize every scoresheet since 1917, and the result is an expansion of its playoff stats and historic box scores. Here’s the page with the all-time box scores. It’s a rather large rabbit hole, and Dave Stubbs explains it in details here.

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Now, if you’re more about checking your brain for a while and indulging in dating-app-level inanity, then you’ll love another ongoing feature that seeks to determine who the greatest Stanley Cup champion of all-time is.

It’s a “Greatest Teams” competition held in conjunction with the League’s Centennial celebration. You get two teams, randomly generated, and then you pick which one would win in a series against the other. The first round of voting was completed on May 3, and now there’s voting on the Top 50 teams remaining.

So, like, this matchup:

And then based on the voting results, we have our winner.

Damn. Really felt Jacques Lemaire would have found a way to slow Gretzky down.

Eventually, you can pick one team and the algorithm generates the other one. And occasionally, the thing spits out a matchup that legitimately would cause a raging debate at the back of the pub:

Hmmm…

Vernon > Hasek!

If you’re curious, the NHL has made the voting results public, which means there’s more transparency in this vote than there is for the NHL All-Star Game.

The current Top 10:

So apparently Pittsburgh Penguins fans have discovered this microsite, eh?

Look, we’re not ones to judge the arbitrary results of a public vote that we have no doubt will produce a rightful and justified Greatest Stanley Cup Champion of All-Time … but the first Montreal Canadiens team on the list is at No. 13 and that’s a [expletive] crime.

But hey, we’re sure the 2016 Penguins are better than this Montreal team.

Who do you think is the best Stanley Cup champ of all-time?

Can’t go wrong with either the 1976 or 1977 Habs or the 1984 Oilers. But man, that 2002 Red Wings team might be the last great assemblage of talent before the salary cap era. The 1997 Wings might be the better team on the ice, but on paper … wow, the 2002 Red Wings were something.

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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