The Athletic is delighted to announce the upcoming release of The Hockey 100, the definitive ranking of the greatest players in modern NHL history, which will be published by William Morrow on October 27. Here, senior writer Sean McIndoe sets the scene with his introduction for the book.If you set out to rank the best players in the modern history of the NHL, is there any suspense at the top of the list?A lot of fans would say no, because Wayne Gretzky is the obvious pick. Some of us who saw Mario Lemieux in his prime might disagree, and maybe you would too if you were lucky enough to see the Bobby Orr era up close. Some of you kids out there might even push for someone such as Sidney Crosby or Connor McDavid. That’s the beauty of being a sports fan and seeing the game through your own lens.But sure, Gretzky is going to rank highly on our list. That’s why we called this top 100 ranking our NHL 99 project: As a nod to the Great One, and to acknowledge that there are still 99 other spots up for grabs.To fill those spots, we convened a panel of eight of The Athletic’s best and brightest, and then also me. The group covered a wide range of age, experience and perspectives. It included a former member of the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee in Eric Duhatschek, a winner of the prestigious Elmer Ferguson Award for hockey journalism, who covered most of these players up close and led us through many of the debates and discussions. Some of us focused on stats and analytics, while others preferred the eye test. In some cases, we heard directly from the players who faced off against the stars we were considering.The goal: To come up with a list of the best 100 players of the modern era. And not just any list, but one that was ranked. No cowardly “in no particular order” copouts like the NHL tried to slip past us back in their centennial season. That league-sanctioned list didn’t even have Evgeni Malkin on it. Surely, we could do better.It was no easy task. It’s tough enough to compare hockey players across positions, trying to decide how to weigh the merits of a 50-goal scorer against a shutdown defenseman against an elite goaltender. That’s before you try to factor in era, from the high-scoring 1970s and ’80s to the Dead Puck Era that followed. What do you do with players whose careers were shortened by injury? Do you rely on the bigger sample size of regular season play, or focus on the playoff games where the lights are brightest? Do you look to modern analytics to make your case, knowing that they’re not available for most of the game’s greats? Is your ideal player built on skill or toughness? Gaudy numbers, or a 200-foot game? You get the picture.In the end, we worked together to generate a list of well over 100 candidates. Then we each submitted our own ranking of 100 players each, which were then combined into one final list. Then we yelled at each other. So much yelling.