>>Do you remember when there were actual, for real defensemen (Doug Harvey, Allan Stanley, Dick Duff, J.C. Tremblay to name a few) and scoring 20 goals in a season really meant something?
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>>Maybe if I hadn't grown up through the six team era, I might feel different, but I did. When I try to watch now, I see players being called 'great' who would have had trouble making the farm clubs back then.
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>I can't speak for the 60's but I started watching the NHL heavily around 1975. That was about 8 years after the first expansion. I've collected many tapes from Flyer, Montreal, and Ranger games in that era. I have a DVD of Reggie Leach's 5 goals against Boston in Game 5 of the conference finals in 1976. As a Flyer fan, there have been a million great moments at the Spectrum.
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> And as much as I loved the game back then, I have to say that the skill and athleticism today are unbelievable. I'll take two players in particular because I try to watch them as much as I can...Ryan Getzlaf and Cory Perry of Anaheim. They have great speed and power and they are snipers as shooters. Whether they'd perform even better in the 1960's....or if Bobby Orr would be as amazing today as he was decades ago, difficult to say.
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>I loved hockey in the 70's when the Broad Street Bullies did the impossible (and people forget that they DID have talent). Then you had the Habs and Guy Lafleur and their run....then the nearly perfect machine of the Islanders....then Gretzky....then Mario....then the almost rise of the Legion of Doom....then the re-birth of Hockey Town with Detroit's cups...then the hated Devils and their cups (god, how I hate the Devils!!!). But I have to say this....the two most impressive post-season runs I've EVER seen were the LA Kings in 2012 and then last spring. When that team decides to turn on the juice, they are relentless in ways I never imagined.
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>So while I sometimes get concerned about the quality of play in other sports (like the NBA, though hopefully that little miracle in Golden State right now is a sign of better times for the sport), IMHO the NHL just gets better and better with each era.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. One of the things that make those you mentioned so good is that they didn't have to play in a league where every team was entirely made up of it's share of the best 150 players in the world. Maybe some of those guys could have played in the six team league, but if you think they'd be the scoring machines they are now playing back then, well... like I said we'll have to agree to disagree.

Bobby Orr changed the game forever. After Orr, nobody wanted to be a defenseman, or if they did, they wanted to do it from the opposing end of the ice. Without true defensemen, scoring became a lot easier.

In fact, here's an interesting thought experiment. Take the top 150 players right now and spread them out over 6 teams. And then think about how the game would be changed.