Roberto has a more established and impressive career and he was also a more influential person to the Canucks. The fact he was named captain really says it all - even though naming the goalie your captain ended up a poor decision.
Comparing McLean and Luongo because they both made it to the SC g7 is really missing the point.
LOL
Also reading the comments, you can tell how stupid most sports fans are. They stick to their favourite time, compare everything to it, and cannot reconcile that those that came later could be better.
Luongo was far and away a better regular season goalie while McLean has the edge in GAA and SV% in the playoffs. McLean finished with a .500 playoff record while Luongo finished one-game above .500.
ultimately it’s a question of what you as a fan(base) want to remember, or in this case memorialize.
luongo was the best rs goalie in franchise history, full stop. he had arguably the single best rs season of any canuck ever (2007), including either sedin, naslund, bertuzzi, bure, petey, hughes, anyone. mclean in his peak year (1992) hit a level not that far above where luongo consitently was every year. and mclean’s other spike year (1989), that was a little below where luongo usually was.
so if the thing we care about is the guy’s objective standing relative to the rest of the league, you can absolutely make an argument that luongo not only is a tier or several above mclean but should be in the rafters. that’s the naslund argument and hey why not bertuzzi while we’re at it?
but here is the nuance: luongo was an overdog. it was an absolute revelation that we got him, and he did what he was expected to do, which is provide us with creme de la creme goaltending year in, year out. this debate, imo, rests on how much we value that revelation. we’d had guys who could win games by themselves before, even guys who could win a whole series, but luongo could win any and every game all by himself and that was unprecedented. he changed the culture not only of the team but (like bure did) also of the fanbase and how we understood our place relative to the rest of the league.
conversely, mclean was an underdog. for years, even after 1992, the league at large didn’t really recognize how good he was. it took the 94 run. that 1989 season was like the last two markstrom seasons in that we knew this was a top notch goalie who should be getting fringe mvp votes but the world didn’t (yet). look at that d: garth butcher and doug lidster, ok bona fine good players; after that broken down paul reinhart who even in his prime wasn’t especially anything defensively, robert nordmark was a pp specialist, harold snepsts’ corpse (slash last hurrah in the playoffs), and a grab bag of revolving human garbage that included jim elmer benning. behind that d, mclean was three games above .500. then he pushed the powerhouse eventual cup winning flames to game 7 OT and lost on a goal that otto kicked in.
then 1992, his mvp season. over the first ten games of tbe year, mclean is 9-0-1, 1.75 GAA, .932 SV%, and the canucks are the surprise number one team in the league. this is basically the 1989 mclean but behind a rebuilt d (lumme-murzyn, diduck-babych, lidster-dirk) where their #1 in 89 was now on the third pair. this remember is before bure joined the team. by far the most successful canucks season ever, finished second in vezina voting behind the second best regular season in the career of imo the greatest goalie of all time.
so mclean is a guy who generally in his prime was a top third goalie with three big spikes, which successfully got more and more recognition. if he’d played in toronto he would have been an all-star most years. if he’d played on the 94 panthers he would have finished second or third in hart voting instead of fourth.
ultimately, mclean in 94 was a massive massive overachievement relative to expectations and the temperature around the league. luongo was one game short of what was expected of him. and actually even if luongo had gotten that 16th win, given his performances in the second halves of the boston and chicago series, he probably still would be remembered historically as having underachieved.
all this to say, the same part of me that values mclean as luongo’s equal
as a ROH candidate is the part of me that values ronning, bieksa, and burrows more highly than morrison, jovo, and bertuzzi. but imo that nuance is the real substance of being a fan. all the other stuff, stats and awards voting and what the HNIC panel out in toronto thinks, is less meaningful to me personally.