Where Does Daniel Alfredsson Rank Among NHL Captains?
Daniel Alfredsson has been many things over his career in Ottawa: rookie, hero, scapegoat, diety, and captain. He has endured slow times and has come within an arm’s length of leading the team to the promised land.
Alfredsson has proudly worn the C in Ottawa for well over a decade. Mandatory Credit: Marc DesRosiers-US PRESSWIRE
But where does he fit among the current NHL leadership hierarchy? An interesting question that does not have a quantifiable answer. However, Tim Bayer at our Network’s Maple Leafs site, Editor In Leaf, took a stab at quantifying the unquantifiable so to speak, and came up with an equation that had Alfie ranked 5th among current NHL captain’s. He finished behind Sidney Crosby, Jarome Iginla, Henrik Sedin and Alex Ovechkin. You can read Tim’s article HERE.
While I can appreciate the attempt, there is more to being a captain than the stats pages can tell you. I am not in an NHL dressing room and most likely if you are reading this then neither are you. It is tough to tell what goes on behind closed doors and every player has a different style of leadership. For instance, Alexei Yashin was Alfie’s predecessor, and as well as he played on the ice, his behavior off it left something to be desired from a leader.
Dylan Nardone from our main NHL page, Too Many Men On The Site has been doing a series on the Captains of the NHL, and he profiled Alfredsson last week, an article to which I contributed. You can check it out HERE.
The bottom line is, picking the best captain involves a lot of subjectiveness, and you could poll 1,000 people and their would be no two rankings the same. But as I said in Dylan’s article, I don’t think there are very many players I would have traded the career of Alfredsson for, for both the player and the individual person he has become.