Better Goal Scorer.....66 or 8?

[IWantSakicAsMyGM]

A healthy Crosby had 84, 85, 89, 89 points in four straight seasons from ages 27-30. Kind of feels like that mic drop alone just kind of negates this whole line of argument.

Look at the "talent" he was playing with during those seasons. Rust never had a 60 point season in his career, and averaged 55 points per 82 games. Kunitz averaged 50 points per 82. Hornqvist averaged 49 points. Dupuis only 39. These 4 players combined for 2 career 30 goal seasons. To me, the fact that these middle 6ers were the best wingers the Pens could get for Crosby until Guentzel came through the draft feels like it proves my point that there was less talent in the league.

 

[psycat]

Ovechkin’s peak goal scoring season is equal or better than Lemieux’s.

This “compiling past a vastly superior peak” talk is pure history revision.

Players who lead the entire league 9 times are not compilers.

If you care to read the post again that was in regards to him being greater or not than Gretzky(as a goalscorer).

Not that I think everything should be taken at face value, but id rather do that than crappy adjusted stats.

Anyway if we wan't to talk about better, not greater, we could start with the fact that Ovi couldn't muster 100 pts in any year for over a decade, sure he scores the goals because he always shoots but a better goalscorer(ie Lemieux) would score more goals if he never looked for a pass. Volume shooter vs complete player who scores just as many goals per game, even adjusted.

Now I will grant that Ovi is, obviously, a phenomenal goalscorer and arguably the greatest one of all time(since he put up the career numbers) but in terms of most effective or best goalscorer? No way. That's like saying someone with 200 soft hits is a better hitter than someone who have 195 which all of them ends up with the opposing player flat on the ice. Hyperbole of course but you get the idea.

 

[bambamcam4ever]

I believe the scoring talent of the players in the league is what led to the scoring levels changing, not the baseless assumption that it was "harder to score".

Which we all understand is a terrible opinion. Because if anything increased talent leads to lower scoring as we can see across multiple sports as better talents make fewer mistakes and mistakes are what mostly lead to goals.

 

[authentic]

"decline" years like coming back from cancer and scoring 76 points in 43 games?

People don’t realize he would also have played like 200-300 more games in his prime scoring around 2 points per game. He likely still would’ve ended up with a very similar points per game overall, just look at Gretzky.

 

[authentic]

Which we all understand is a terrible opinion. Because if anything increased talent leads to lower scoring as we can see across multiple sports as better talents make fewer mistakes and mistakes are what mostly lead to goals.

I’ll never fathom how people automatically attribute lower scoring to worse talent, especially when scoring rises after things like goalie equipment reduction, crack down on obstruction, rise in empty net goals, and expansion (scoring has literally always gone up with expansion teams added thinning out the depth of talent amongst teams).

 

[WarriorofTime]

Out of curiosity, do you think it's just a coincidence that scoring jumped so much right around 1980? I can't help but wonder if that has anything to do with the single highest scoring player in NHL history's rookie season. The plateau between 1980 and 85-86 also seems to be the years when Gretzky was putting up 200+ points.

It's been shown repeatedly that one Gretzky can't raise league scoring that much. Obviously you have undertaken all efforts to try and avoid using this information with your previously held beliefs but rudimentary statistical analysis makes this obvious.

It is not considered coincidental or curious as to why scoring exploded when it did. The overwhelming consensus amongst all of who have studied is that the NHL underwent rapid expansion. The 1966-67 NHL season had 6 teams, the 1979-80 NHL season had 21 teams. The League 3.5X over the course of thirteen seasons. Talent pools tend to catch up eventually as enough time goes by, but through the 80s it hadn't been allowed to settle and catch up yet. This gave high-end scorers a huge advantage because much of the league was "not NHL caliber" but suddenly were.

Imagine what would happen if the NHL suddenly had 64 NHL teams next year. The frequency with which the top scorers face a Hellebuyck or Vasilevskiy in net drops significantly. Top line players will double the rate at which they see far inferior players lined up across from them. Scoring would skyrocket.

 

[authentic]

It's been shown repeatedly that one Gretzky can't raise league scoring that much. Obviously you have undertaken all efforts to try and avoid using this information with your previously held beliefs but rudimentary statistical analysis makes this obvious.

It is not considered coincidental or curious as to why scoring exploded when it did. The overwhelming consensus amongst all of who have studied is that the NHL underwent rapid expansion. The 1966-67 NHL season had 6 teams, the 1979-80 NHL season had 21 teams. The League 3.5X over the course of thirteen seasons. Talent pools tend to catch up eventually as enough time goes by, but through the 80s it hadn't been allowed to settle and catch up yet. This gave high-end scorers a huge advantage because much of the league was "not NHL caliber" but suddenly were.

Imagine what would happen if the NHL suddenly had 64 NHL teams next year. The frequency with which the top scorers face a Hellebuyck or Vasilevskiy in net drops significantly. Top line players will double the rate at which they see far inferior players lined up across from them. Scoring would skyrocket.

Scoring already just went up with two expansion teams added. This stuff is easy to see so not sure why this is even a conversation.

 

[Wierzbowski426]

I think they are probably pretty close just for goal scoring. Ill take Mario with the tiebreak being as he was literally better at EVERYTHING else by a pretty huge margin.

Peak:
Actually when you account for scoring environment, Ovechkin's peak goal scoring season is equal to or better than Lemieux's:

NHL & WHA Single Season Leaders and Records for Adjusted Goals | Hockey-Reference.com

1. Brett Hull (78), 2. Alex Ovechkin (72), 3. Mario Lemieux (71), 4. Cooney Weiland (70), Phil Esposito (70), 6. Wayne Gretzky (69), 7. Babe Dye (68), Wayne Gretzky (68), Steven Stamkos (68), Auston Matthews (68)

www.hockey-reference.com

tie or edge to Ovechkin.

Prime:
Ovechkin led the NHL in goals 9 times.
Lemieux led the NHL in goals 3 times.

Ovechkin easily wins.

Longevity:
Ovechkin has 997 adjusted goals
Lemieux has 616

Total ass kicking here by Ovechkin in the longevity department.

Even if we give Lemieux the benefit of extrapolation:
Lemieux led the NHL in GPG 6 times.
Ovechkin led the NHL in GPG 9 times.

So any which way you slice it, Ovechkin is the superior goal scorer.

Here's a bunch more data that Lemieux fans aren't going to want to read:

View attachment 985787

This should include a few more things.

How about empty net goals for example? Gimmick 3on3 goals? etc

 

[paracord]

Lemieux

One has to wonder what the numbers would be with a healthy career or if he just started focusing more on sniping.

I'd make a conservative guess and say the +/- would be 1000.

He missed more than 200 games in his prime, where he was scoring more than .75 goals per game (he scored 85 goals in 76 games in '89, and 69 goals in 60 games in '93).

He also missed 2.5 full seasons at the end of the 90s when he obviously had lead-leading goal scoring ability still, as evidenced by his 2001 and 2002 seasons.

 

[Overrated]

Mario is the GOAT.

 

[IWantSakicAsMyGM]

It's been shown repeatedly that one Gretzky can't raise league scoring that much. Obviously you have undertaken all efforts to try and avoid using this information with your previously held beliefs but rudimentary statistical analysis makes this obvious.

It is not considered coincidental or curious as to why scoring exploded when it did. The overwhelming consensus amongst all of who have studied is that the NHL underwent rapid expansion. The 1966-67 NHL season had 6 teams, the 1979-80 NHL season had 21 teams. The League 3.5X over the course of thirteen seasons. Talent pools tend to catch up eventually as enough time goes by, but through the 80s it hadn't been allowed to settle and catch up yet. This gave high-end scorers a huge advantage because much of the league was "not NHL caliber" but suddenly were.

Imagine what would happen if the NHL suddenly had 64 NHL teams next year. The frequency with which the top scorers face a Hellebuyck or Vasilevskiy in net drops significantly. Top line players will double the rate at which they see far inferior players lined up across from them. Scoring would skyrocket.

The only people saying it's one Gretzky are the strawmen so many people seem to want to build in this thread. I only used him because he's the best example of how a single player CAN impact league wide scoring, given that he's scored the most points in a single season. Obviously, it wasn't just him, even though he had the greatest impact.

In addition to Gretzky, look at the other high end scoring talent that entered the league over a 12 year period between 1979 and 1991. Bourque, Messier, Gartner, Coffey, Kurri, Francis, MacInnis, Hawerchuk, Gilmour, Yzerman, LaFontaine, Lemieux, Hull, Sakic, Shanahan, Fleury, Jagr, Lindros, Forsberg, etc. All of these high end offensive guys made scoring look easy, and helped their lesser teammates score a lot more points than they otherwise would have, dragging scoring averages up significantly.

But then those high end offensive guys started declining and retiring, and most of them got replaced with lesser "high end" guys like Benn and Duchene and Hall and Getzlaf. The high end defensemen of that era also retired, and most of them got replaced by lesser "high end" defensemen like Phaneuf, Burns, Bouwmeester and Mike Green. Yes, there were a lot of crappy defensemen in the 80s and 90s, but there were also still a lot of pylons in the league after the lockout too. Just look at all the terrible defensemen getting regular playing time around the league. Nate Guenin, Greg Zanon, Shane Orr'Brien, Ryan O'Byrne, Matt Hunwick. Jeff Finger, etc. (and that's just from the Avs). It should have been so easy for elite scorers to put up pretty big numbers against these scrubs, but there were only 3 or 4 elite scorers in the league, and half of them struggled with injuries, so instead, we mostly got the 2nd and 3rd tier forwards playing against 2nd and 3rd tier defensemen, which resulted in fewer advantages for the offense and lower scoring overall.

And, if the league had 64 teams next year, I'd assume that the "far inferior" players on those 32 new teams would be a lot of middle-6 or bottom 6 caliber forwards and depth defensemen who would likely struggle to score much more than they would in playing defense. I wouldn't expect most/any of these teams to get an elite scorer right off the bat, so I'm not convinced that the same number of elite scorers would score enough additional points against these new teams to mitigate the 400 new mediocre scorers dragging averages down. I think the league would need to add a lot more high end talent to this 64 team league before scoring goes up too much.

 

[IWantSakicAsMyGM]

Scoring already just went up with two expansion teams added. This stuff is easy to see so not sure why this is even a conversation.

Scoring also went up in 1970-71, before Atlanta and NYI joined the league. That was right around the time that Orr and Esposito started putting up big numbers in Boston. The Bruins put up a ridiculous 5.12 goals per game that season. Was it "easier to score" only in Boston that year, or was it the talent on the team that drove their scoring up?

When scoring went up again in '72, 23 year old Bobby Clark had his first 100 point season. 21 year old Marcel Dionne scored 40 goals for the first time in his career. 22 year old former 1OA pick Gilbert Perreault had his first 80 point season. The guys they played with all saw an uptick in their production.

When KC and Washington joined in 74, 23 year old Guy LaFleur scored 119 points, his first season with more than 65 points. 23 year old Dionne scored 121 that year, his first season over 90.

When they added the WHA teams in 79, that came with Gretzky. The draft that year added Messier, Bourque, Gartner, Goulet, Hunter and Anderson to the league. The next year added Kurri, Coffey, Savard, Murphy, Nicholls, etc. And the talent just kept rolling in for the next couple of decades, and the guys who got injured or retired were replaced with comparable players. Then, around 1992, the forwards in the draft started sucking most years, and the offensive talent level started going down for the next 20ish years.

That's what I see when I look back at what drove scoring. I don't see any career 50 point guys suddenly becoming 100+ point guys because of expansion, or because they changed the goal pad rules, I see high end young talent joining the league and hitting their prime.

I do agree it is much easier to see the most obvious correlation and pretend it's the reason, and am not surprised that so many people take this at face value. It's much more difficult and time consuming to actually dig into the context and try to actually figure out the cause.

 

[WarriorofTime]

That's what I see when I look back at what drove scoring. I don't see any career 50 point guys suddenly becoming 100+ point guys because of expansion, or because they changed the goal pad rules, I see high end young talent joining the league and hitting their prime.

I do agree it is much easier to see the most obvious correlation and pretend it's the reason, and am not surprised that so many people take this at face value. It's much more difficult and time consuming to actually dig into the context and try to actually figure out the cause.

That's not what you did though. You're just going off "vibes" that just list off the names of entering players and their stat lines fail there is not much of an empirical basis as you're not looking at the entirety of the league across the board even if you were to (try to) control for "stars".

20th scorer 1966-67 (70 game season): 45 points
20th scorer 1971-72 (78 game season): 70 points
20th scorer 1976-77 (80 game season): 78 points
20th scorer 1981-82 (80 game season): 92 points
20th scorer 1986-87 (80 game season): 81 points
20th scorer 1991-92 (80 game season): 87 points
20th scorer 1996-97 (82 game season): 82 points
20th scorer 2001-02 (82 game season): 71 points
20th scorer 2006-07 (82 game season): 84 points
20th scorer 2011-12 (82 game season): 71 points
20th scorer 2016-17 (82 game season): 69 points
20th scorer 2021-22 (82 game season): 86 points

Whether Gretzky exists or not is one thing, but whether Morris Lukowich, a guy on an average team, simply transcends era is another matter entirely

 

[filinski77]

It is completely without basis to think that scoring has not actually become easier and gone up.

30th place in points from 2014 to 2022: 65, 64, 63, 75, 78, 73, 72, 81 (pro-rated the 2020/21/22 to full 82gp)
-> Is someone really going to say that in between 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 top-end NHL players just got better?

Starting in 2017/2018 the NHL started reducing goalie pad sizes by quite a lot. Funny that this correlates with an immediate huge uptick in league wide scoring.

Look at what has changed in the NHL since the late 2010's:
1) Huge changes in goalie pads. Something that factually will increase scoring

2) The addition of Vegas in 2017 and Seattle in 2022. This factually added 3.3% more players to the league each time (6%+ total more jobs). This is an immediate dilution in average talent since over the course of the few years you wouldn't see any substantial change in talent pool or nationalization of the game. Also factually should increase scoring

3) In 2016 3-on-3 overtime which also coincidentally with a huge decrease to shootouts. This will factually increase average scoring.

4) 2018 had big changes in how referees enforce slashing penalties, faceoffs. This logically will allow skill players more free reign to have an offensive opportunity when there are less slashing instances

5) A huge difference in the general breakdown of defensemen. Look at the top-D in the world in the 2010's, they were almost all (other than a couple) BIG, defensively minded and defensively structured D. Whereas now, the best D in the world are all not as good at defending, but also a lot better skaters, passers, shooters (more offensively skilled). This is a 2 fold impact on scoring levels. First - offensive D help out forwards score more due to more support, better passing etc. And second, it makes it easier to score on when other teams top D are generally known more for being slightly smaller, less defensively minded.

6) General coaching and team structure. That has changed for sure toward more of an all-offence style overall. Pretty simple.

For the people who say it's just the talent being better. I say:
Look at Crosby scoring 84, 85, 89 points (3rd, 3rd, 2nd) place finishes. Do we really think that the following players from the last few years were better than 27-29 year old Crosby: Panarin, Pastrnak, Matthews, Rantanen, JT Miller, Kaprizov, Point, Marner

Do we really think that 9th place JT miller in 2024 (103 points) was equivalent to Crosby's 2014 dominant Art Ross win (104 points)?

Look at some elite players who played their prime before the scoring uptick vs after:
Crosby: From age 31 to 36 Crosby saw equal or better raw production than he had from age 27 to 30.

Ovechkin: From age 32 to 39 Ovechkin saw better raw production than he had from age 25 to 31

Kane: Outside of his 2016 Art Ross, Kane saw better raw production from age 30 to 33 than he saw from 22 to 29.

Malkin: He saw better production from age 30 to 33 then he saw in 26 to 29

Stamkos: He saw better production from age 27 to 33 than he did in 23 to 26

The coincidental part of these age splits? Despite all of these legends getting into the age where NHL players are less productive (post 27-30), their production actually increased (but league-wide results got worse). These are 4-7+ year sample sizes for both. Nobody can say with a straight face that Crosby/Ovi/Malkin etc got BETTER as hockey players. We've all seen them at their best.

These samples fit right into the time league wide scoring increased - and their production increased as well.

 

[bambamcam4ever]

The only people saying it's one Gretzky are the strawmen so many people seem to want to build in this thread. I only used him because he's the best example of how a single player CAN impact league wide scoring, given that he's scored the most points in a single season. Obviously, it wasn't just him, even though he had the greatest impact.

In addition to Gretzky, look at the other high end scoring talent that entered the league over a 12 year period between 1979 and 1991. Bourque, Messier, Gartner, Coffey, Kurri, Francis, MacInnis, Hawerchuk, Gilmour, Yzerman, LaFontaine, Lemieux, Hull, Sakic, Shanahan, Fleury, Jagr, Lindros, Forsberg, etc. All of these high end offensive guys made scoring look easy, and helped their lesser teammates score a lot more points than they otherwise would have, dragging scoring averages up significantly.

But then those high end offensive guys started declining and retiring, and most of them got replaced with lesser "high end" guys like Benn and Duchene and Hall and Getzlaf. The high end defensemen of that era also retired, and most of them got replaced by lesser "high end" defensemen like Phaneuf, Burns, Bouwmeester and Mike Green. Yes, there were a lot of crappy defensemen in the 80s and 90s, but there were also still a lot of pylons in the league after the lockout too. Just look at all the terrible defensemen getting regular playing time around the league. Nate Guenin, Greg Zanon, Shane Orr'Brien, Ryan O'Byrne, Matt Hunwick. Jeff Finger, etc. (and that's just from the Avs). It should have been so easy for elite scorers to put up pretty big numbers against these scrubs, but there were only 3 or 4 elite scorers in the league, and half of them struggled with injuries, so instead, we mostly got the 2nd and 3rd tier forwards playing against 2nd and 3rd tier defensemen, which resulted in fewer advantages for the offense and lower scoring overall.

And, if the league had 64 teams next year, I'd assume that the "far inferior" players on those 32 new teams would be a lot of middle-6 or bottom 6 caliber forwards and depth defensemen who would likely struggle to score much more than they would in playing defense. I wouldn't expect most/any of these teams to get an elite scorer right off the bat, so I'm not convinced that the same number of elite scorers would score enough additional points against these new teams to mitigate the 400 new mediocre scorers dragging averages down. I think the league would need to add a lot more high end talent to this 64 team league before scoring goes up too much.

Your logic has so many holes it's not worth it to address. But a 12 year span? Scoring started declining by the mid 80s. What does Jagr have anything to 80s scoring levels. And league scoring levels steadily dropped for the first 15 years of his career

 

[IWantSakicAsMyGM]

Your logic has so many holes it's not worth it to address. But a 12 year span? Scoring started declining by the mid 80s. What does Jagr have anything to 80s scoring levels. And league scoring levels steadily dropped for the first 15 years of his career

That sounds like a very convenient way to pretend you're right without having to actually say anything meaningful.

Jagr was drafted in 1990, therefore he was one of the amazing players that entered the league during that 12 year stretch of great drafts, before the steady flow of offensive talent in the draft dried up. He also regularly led the league in scoring during his prime, so was obviously one of the guys driving scoring rates up. But, to keep the scoring levels steady would require more than a handful of elite scorers coming through the draft between 91 and the 2010s, and that obviously didn't happen.