It’s especially ridiculous because the difference in their eras is less than .1 goals per game and Ovechkin plays twice as much on the powerplay
When you start down this road of adjusting stats, it just gets so far off the point of stats that what you end up with doesn’t relate to actual reality anymore.
You start counting up goals per second on the ice, you start finding medians of penalty kill time and subtracting that (well of course, because you don’t usually score on the penalty kill, unless you’re gretzky but people smoked back then so we won’t count any of those), and then you need to take the median of the last 100 years of hockey, find the middle of thousands of goals scored per game, and then use that as a baseline hypothetical season.
Then you can start handing out 0.02 of a goal because of who the line mates were or weren’t, matthews plays with Marner and Ovechkin didn’t have a great center one or two seasons, so obviously those Ovechkin goals are worth 1.17 goals and matthews are only worth 0.87 of a goal.
And then one season there were 4.85 goals per game, and that’s higher than 4.30 goals per game, so subtract another 0.55 from matthews, so really matthews goals are only worth 0.32 and you need to add 0.17 goals for Ovechkin because of a higher scoring season and now every Ovechkin goal is really 1.75 of a matthews goal, and don’t even mention gretzky because Ovechkin adjusted has scored 85% of what gretzky actually scored and that’s good enough because we all know Bobby hull was out of shape as was Bure , just like the rest of the league and Lemieux smoked in the locker room. And some guys were plumbers or whatever during the off season, so take goals off for that.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that Ovechkin is the greatest goal scorer of all time even though adjusted as much as I want I can still only get to 80% of gretzky and matthews is a scrub and he’s really only scored 23 goals in 500 games and makes ninety-billion dollars on the cap and Stutzle is a much better choice, it’s too bad the sens have all that cap room and the leafs can only ice 4 players a game.
I’ll link you to the google doc with all my spreadsheets, and you can check my work. Trust the science, bro. I did the math, matthews and gretzky goals just aren’t the same. Ovechkin had to score goals walking up hill in the snow both ways.
