At the end of the previous article, as you might recall, I asked and answered the question of who had played against the most major league hockey franchises. On the flip side of the coin, who played with the most major league franchises? In the original Klein and Reif Hockey Compendium, Klein and Reif touch upon this subject and produce two lists to answer this question. The first list contains a list of 12 players who, as of 1985-86, had played for 7 or more NHL franchises (there were actually 13 players; they missed Randy Holt, but I won't count that against them because, as I discover while writing this article, it's not really easy to determine this information, and it was probably way harder in the pre-Internet days of the mid 1980s). They also listed 7 players who played for 8 or more franchises in the NHL and WHA combined.
The new edition of the book doesn't contain these lists, but I'd imagine that it would have something to do with the fact that one of their acknowlegements mentions someone editing down their manuscript when "it finally came in a mere 150% longer than was called for in the contract". Another possible reason why the book doesn't contain these lists is that they'd be so long now. For example, there are now around 80 players who have played for 7 or more NHL franchises.
At the top of the list of people who have played with the most major league franchises are five people who have played for 10, and they are:
| Name | # of seasons played | First season | Last season |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bobby Sheehan | 13 | 1969-70 | 1981-82 |
| Wayne Connolly | 15 | 1960-61 | 1976-77 |
| Michel Petit | 16 | 1982-83 | 1997-98 |
| J.J. Daigneault | 16 | 1984-85 | 2000-01 |
| Larry Hillman | 22 | 1954-55 | 1975-76 |
So, if someone were to ask you who the most travelled players of all time were, the answer would be the list above, right? Wow, this was a quick article for me to write, wasn't it? Hold on a second, though. What do we mean by "most travelled"? If we mean "someone who has played for the most major league franchises", then that would be the people above. But maybe we mean something different.
What if I were to ask who the best goal-scorer of all time was? If raw total career goals were the only criterion, then Gordie Howe would be the winner (contrary to what you might be led to think by The-WHA-Never-Actually-Existed historical revisionists, Gordie Howe scored 975 major league goals, whereas Wayne Gretzky only totalled 940). Well, yeah, but Howe played for 32 seasons, and Gretzky only played for 21. If he had played 11 more seasons, he'd surely have scored far more than 35 more goals. Okay, but most of Gretzky's goals were racked up in an age when league-wide scoring was high, while Howe played a lot of his career in the relatively-low-scoring 1950's and 1960's. Sure, but... and so on, until the cows come home.
Back to the question of who the most travelled players were. All of the five players listed above had relatively long careers, giving them more opportunities to play with lots of teams, and they all played during eras when there were a lot of teams available to play for (there were 32 major-league hockey teams active during 1974-75 and 1975-76, when three of the players above were active, and as for the other two, well, we all know how many teams are in the NHL nowadays).
To further emphasise the point I'm making, out of the 80 players who have played for 7 or more NHL franchises, about half of them have played in the NHL no later than two years ago. Obviously, this list is populated primarily by players who have played recently because there are more NHL teams than there ever were before. Also, there are more ways for players to move from one team to another. Expansion drafts are one of these ways. The doors of free agency have been opened somewhat wider in the past few years as well. Another reason is that, with nowhere near enough talent to go around, players' careers, on the average, last longer than they did ten years ago. Would Paul Coffey have been able to play for eight different franchises if his career were, say, 14 years long instead of 21 years long? Probably not.
On the other side of the coin, obviously no-one on that list could have possibly played their entire career in the inaccurately-named "Original Six" era. Out of those 80 people on that list, the only one who played their entire career before 1966-67 was Carl Voss, who played for seven franchises at a time when there were only ten to play for. Furthermore, he managed to do this in a span of only eight years. No wonder he's in the Hall of Fame.
To summarise, it was a lot easier for Sheehan, Connolly, Petit, Daigneault and Hillman to play for 10 teams than it would be for someone like Voss. But shouldn't Voss get more credit for his travelling than these five guys should? Is there a way we can statistically level the playing field, so to speak? Of course there is, otherwise I wouldn't even have asked the question. My proposed statistic for measuring the most travelled players of all time should give credit for playing with a lot of teams in a short period of time, and should give credit for playing for a lot of teams when there are relatively fewer teams around.
Let's take the ratios of (# of franchises played for)/(number of years played) and (# of franchises played for)/(number of franchises active during player's career). For someone like Carl Voss, both of these ratios would be relatively large so adding them together seems like a reasonable thing to do. The problem with just doing that is that both of these ratios would also be high for anyone who played for only one season. So, obviously we care about the total number of teams played for as well. After a bit of thought, you might come up with the following formula:
/ (# of franchises) (# of franchises) \
(# of franchises) × | ----------------- + ------------------------ |
\ (# of years) (# of active franchises) /
or
/ 1 1 \
(# of franchises)² × | ------------ + ------------------------ |
\ (# of years) (# of active franchises) /
In that second equation, that's a superscript "2" just to the right of the "# of teams", in case it's a little hard to read.
Let's do a sample calculation, to see how this might work. We'll take Brent Ashton, who as you might remember made headlines a few years ago for playing with a record number of NHL teams (not franchises). His record has long ago been eclipsed, but that's not the issue here. At any rate, Ashton played major-league hockey in the NHL between 1979-80 and 1992-93, for a total of 14 seasons. In that time, he played with eight NHL franchises: Vancouver, Colorado-New Jersey, Minnesota, Quebec, Detroit, Winnipeg, Boston, and Calgary. During that time, there were 24 different NHL franchises around (there were 21 in 1979-80, San Jose was added in 1991-92 and Ottawa and Tampa Bay in 1992-93). Plugging in those numbers in the formula, we get (8)² ×(1/14 + 1/24). Doing the calculations, we get a value of 7.24. To give this a name, let's call it (as you might have guessed by the title of this section) the Travelled Index. Note the key word "index", so don't go around saying that Ashton played for 7.24 adjusted teams or something dumb like that. The following is a list of all major league players (22 in total) with a travelled index of at least 8:
| Name | # of Franchises | First Season | Last Season | # of Seasons | Total # of Active Franchises | Travelled Index |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Danny Gruen | 7 | 1972-73 | 1976-77 | 5 | 34 | 11.24 |
| Archie Briden | 8 | 1916-17 | 1930-31 | 8 | 20 | 11.20 |
| Ron Ward | 8 | 1969-70 | 1976-77 | 7 | 34 | 11.03 |
| Carl Voss | 7 | 1926-27 | 1937-38 | 8 | 10 | 11.03 |
| Ken Hammond | 8 | 1984-85 | 1992-93 | 8 | 24 | 10.67 |
| Bobby Sheehan | 10 | 1969-70 | 1981-82 | 13 | 34 | 10.63 |
| Michel Petit | 10 | 1982-83 | 1997-98 | 16 | 26 | 10.10 |
| Wayne Connolly | 10 | 1960-61 | 1976-77 | 15 | 34 | 9.61 |
| J.J. Daigneault | 10 | 1984-85 | 2000-01 | 16 | 30 | 9.58 |
| Tony Hrkac | 9 | 1986-87 | 2001-02 | 12 | 30 | 9.45 |
| Kevin Miller | 9 | 1988-89 | 2001-02 | 12 | 30 | 9.45 |
| Vic Lynn | 6 | 1942-43 | 1954-55 | 11 | 6 | 9.27 |
| Jarrod Skalde | 8 | 1990-91 | 2001-02 | 9 | 30 | 9.24 |
| Gary Bredin | 4 | 1974-75 | 1975-76 | 2 | 34 | 8.47 |
| John Hughes | 7 | 1974-75 | 1980-81 | 7 | 34 | 8.44 |
| Paul Fenton | 7 | 1984-85 | 1991-92 | 8 | 22 | 8.35 |
| Gary MacGregor | 6 | 1974-75 | 1978-79 | 5 | 34 | 8.26 |
| Larry Mavety | 6 | 1972-73 | 1976-77 | 5 | 34 | 8.26 |
| Harry Smith | 5 | 1908-09 | 1913-14 | 4 | 13 | 8.17 |
| Roger Jenkins | 6 | 1930-31 | 1938-39 | 8 | 10 | 8.10 |
| Bobby Dollas | 9 | 1983-84 | 2000-01 | 15 | 30 | 8.10 |
| Leo Cook | 5 | 1916-17 | 1922-23 | 4 | 14 | 8.04 |
Danny Gruen, who in his short career played for a grand total of seven different teams, gets the title of "most travelled player", followed closely by Archie Briden. Carl Voss, whom we mentioned earlier, winds up in fourth place, a mere 2/10,000th of a point behind Ron Ward.
Quite an interesting assortment of (for the most part) journeymen, don't you think? I won't comment on all of the players on the list, but notice that, for the most part, all eras of the game are represented in this list. The majority of players on this list played in an era when there were lots of teams, but one of the reasons for that is because, when there's lots of teams, there's also going to be lots of players. The larger the universe, the more people that are going to be able to perform such "feats".
Obviously the fate of the universe doesn't hinge on this statistic picking the "most travelled players" with 100% accuracy, so I'm not going to bother adjusting it, even though I could. Here are some possible improvements, though:
One nit is in that "total number of franchises" number. Take a look at someone like Archie Briden. There were 20 different franchises active during his career. However, out of those franchises, three of them (Spokane Canaries, Montreal Wanderers, and 228th Battalion) were only active during one year of Briden's career (1916-17), and five other franchises were active for no more than three years of Briden's career. Is it fair to count 20 franchises when Briden couldn't possibly have played for all of them? While we're talking about this number, is it fair to count franchises in leagues that the player in question never played in? Maybe, maybe not.
Speaking once more about Briden, his eight seasons were played over a span of 15 years. In my mind, his achievement is therefore a tiny little bit less significant than someone who played with eight franchises over a period of eight consecutive years. The Travelled Index doesn't reflect that, though.
Another thing that the travelled index doesn't consider is the ease of moving from team to team. For example, read Eric Whitehead's description of hockey at the start of the 21st century in the book A Hockey Legend: Cyclone Taylor:
These were times of flux for Canadian hockey, a game that was struggling for a true national identity and would eventually stretch westward beyond Winnipeg. It was racked by growing pains. There was no dominant league or association in the latter-day style of the National Hockey League and its president, Clarence Campbell, or any truly national governing body. The game's growth seemed aimless and confused.
Leagues were formed, shrank, were enlarged, revamped, folded, and reformed. Teams moved, changed names, and players drifted about the landscape like snowflakes in a lazy prairie breeze.
Oh wait, that was the beginning of the 20th century he was describing, wasn't it? You'd hardly be able to tell the difference, would you? Anyway, the point I'm making is that, the easier it is for players to go from one team to another, more will do so. So, in the modern-day NHL, with new expansion teams being added every 25 minutes or so and with an expansion draft to go along with it, and also with free agency, it's a lot easier for players to play for lots of teams than it was in, say, the 1950's. That's another factor that the Travelled Index doesn't take into effect.
Still, since the players on the Travelled Index coincides fairly well with my intuitive mental picture of who should be on there (although, to be fair, there were a few surprises), I think this was a worthwhile, if not overly significant, exercise.
For questions or comments, please e-mail James Yolkowski.
This article is Copyright © 2002, James Yolkowski. You may reprint or reproduce this article, as long as this paragraph is also reproduced. The original article and others like it can be found at http://www.sentex.net/~ajy/hockey/.