Would Bobby Orr be the greatest NHL player of all time if not for injury?

If knee injuries hadn't forced Bobby Orr to retire early, he would have added two more Stanley Cups and have finished his career as the greatest NHL player of all-time.

Video Transcript

NICK ASHBOURNE: Bobby Orr was, without a doubt, one of the best players to ever lace up a pair of skates. He won eight consecutive Norris Trophies, led his team to two Stanley Cups, and owns five of the top eight point seasons for a blueliner in NHL history.

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As spectacular as Orr was, you won't find him at the top of too many NHL leaderboards. That's because a series of knee injuries forced him to retire during his age-30 season when he had just 657 NHL games under his belt. In this episode of NHL Multiverse, we're going to examine what would have happened if Orr had the same durability as Nicklas Lidstrom, the legendary Detroit Red Wings defenseman who played 20 seasons in the NHL and skated at least 75 games in 18 of them.

Let's start with where things went wrong for Bobby Orr. Between 1967-'68 and 1974-'75, he had 829 points in 560 games and won the Norris Trophy every single season. After that point, he played just 36 games in the NHL. Lidstrom, on the other hand, played 1,113 games from his age-27 season until his retirement. What we're going to do in this exercise is see what Orr could have done with those 1,113 games.

In Lidstrom's case, the point scoring really didn't decline. In fact, it got better as he entered his 30s. But for Orr, we're going to assume a little bit of a fall-off because he was at such a height during his mid-20s. So we're going to find another defenseman to model Orr's possible decline against. In this case, we're looking at the second most dangerous offensive defenseman in NHL history, the guy with five of the top 10 seasons from a blueliner in terms of points, and that man is Paul Coffey.

From the beginning of his career through age 26, Coffey had 1.26 points per game. From 27 to 31, he held steady at 1.28. And then we saw a decline down to 1.05 for the next four years. We're going to use that decline in four year chunks to model out how many points Orr would have gotten in this version of his career.

Based on Lidstrom's games played and Coffey's trajectory, Orr would have gotten 457 points from age 27 to 30. From 31 to 34, we're looking at 414 points. The next four years, 284. And the final three, 152.

That might sound like a little bit of number soup, but here's where we net out. In our universe, Bobby Orr had 45 points from age 27 on. In the one where he stays healthy like Lidstrom did, we're looking at 1,307. In this universe, Orr ends his career with 2,177 points. That's second to only Wayne Gretzky in NHL history. And what's crazy about that number is it might be a little bit low. Because in this version of history, Orr's career is continuing into the 1980s, the offensive heyday in NHL history.

In terms of team success, if he continues to win Stanley Cups at the rate he did earlier in his career, we're looking at three more rings for Bobby Orr. That's five for his career and an untold number of Norris Trophies. In this universe, Bobby Orr hangs up his skates after the 1990-'91 season. He's widely considered to be the best hockey player who ever lived.

What hypotheticals exist in your NHL Multiverse? Let me know in the comments.