My apologies.
You have definitely been respectful.
I guess the question I should have simply asked, was it necessary for Bossy to score more than he did, under his circumstances?
Because the Islanders are near the top of the league in GF and GA, and they're generally challenging for a cup for the bulk of his time with the team, what's to be gained for Bossy by going for more? He's in a unique spot, that Potvin wasn't in at the beginning of his career. The team was already pretty good once Bossy arrived.
What I don't get with most people, is they fail to see that he elevated that team offensively. He's not a freeloader. He backed it up with his production in the playoffs. I don't know what else he needed to accomplish.
Any one of his teammates that scored 40 goals, or hit the 100-point mark, had him on their wing.
No hard feelings brother, no apologies necessary, I enjoy talking hockey with you
I don't think Bossy need to score anymore given his circumstances no.
I am actually not with the building a hard and fast formula to rank players offensively sort of thing based on various stats/placements, for precisely the reason that there are so many factors in play (role, team style, linemates, era, opponents, injuries) that you basically rub into an incommensurable mess here.
Same thing with awards voting, I don't really think too much of the fact that Hull has a better Hart trophy voting record than Bossy or whatever. For me Hull's star power was better captured in all the magazines he was postered on the cover, or being on talk shows, or getting his book deal just a few years in his career, or having his own video game and comic book, or having like video series with him on shooting and whatever. Even then, I understand the star power thing is not easily comparable from the early eighties to the early nineties given how much more a big deal hockey and the NHL was in the general cultural milieu as well as the rise of star based marketing taken from basketball.
Same sort of thing as our previous discussion where like I totally understood why LaFontaine didn't score as much, especially in terms of assists on the Island as compared to upstate later on, vastly different circumstances for the same player lead to different results.
I certainly don't judge Yzerman or Fedorov poorly on their suppressed stats during the cup years, when they stepped on the ice I never felt they were giving up anything to like Forsberg or Sakic despite like big statistical differences (Fedorov though you can say mailed it in at times which also affected his stats in a way that I would judge but that's a different matter).
Now I did sort of show as counterexamples to stuff posted about career goals per game rate that Hull's stats by themselves sort of hang with Bossy's goalscoring even if you go to 10 years, and even if you remove the top season.
The stat I was actually most floored by for Hull was his go ahead/tying goal dominance in 1990-1991 because it's such an outlier, dude just scored "important" goals like no other that year.
As a total player beyond goalscoring, well I think there's an argument for Hull for his best three years that he was a player that could even eclipse the great Mike Bossy, but yeah, there was definitely a fall off in his play after 1991-1992, whereas Bossy kept chugging along consistently until injuries did him in. But for sure there are things Bossy has that Hull doesn't. He was a more willing playmaker, he was better defensively.
Could Hull have done those things as well had he been in Bossy's situation? I think he could have made up some of the gap had he been in Bossy's situation as I think Bossy could have made up some of the goals he lags behind in had he been the star in St. Louis. As you mentioned, yeah put Gartner in either of these situations and he probably isn't going to do as well in either, but swap Bossy and Hull and it's a much for fair swap in terms of filling each other shoes.
I do believe Hull had some advantages in physical talents that Bossy didn't (strength and shot mostly). That's why I do think as a goal scorer he was simply better. As a player though, well even though I'm going to bat hard for Hull I'd by lying if I thought it was clear cut for Hull at all. As I said for LaFontaine and Yzerman, flip a coin, these things are hardly cut and dry, they were both amongst the very best in their times.
Bossy is clearly the generally higher regarded player in the hockey world after all, I'm just mostly interested in pointing out that Hull's game has sort of been forgotten and stereotyped unfairly, he also was quite the package, even if he didn't get everything going as long as Bossy.
You see Ovechkin's career sometimes called out as the Bobby Hull period and the Brett Hull period as a pejorative of Ovechkin's prime after the late 2000s. I think it's more fair to stylistically compare by saying like early Ovechkin was like peak Brett Hull and then after that it was like not peak Brett Hull lol
