Never saw him play, but just looking at his stats...
6th most goals scored
15 Consecutive 30 goal seasons (Record)
17 30 goals seasons in total (Record)
Why isn't he as deserving?
Here's a simple, logical way to put it.
Your short cursory argument is based on goal scoring. And it should be. Gartner was a good goal scorer and that was about all he did.
Gartner's 15 consecutive 30-goal seasons and 700+ goals look great, but they were a result of being born in just the right year and being able to play in the exact highest-scoring 15-year period hockey has ever seen. During that time there were better goal scorers, but some were older than him, some were younger, and others got injured a few times, causing them to miss out on interesting anomalies like his streak. He scored a lot of goals, but he wasn't the best goal scorer of his generation. He was once top-5 in goals (5th), something a couple hundred players have done. He was top-10 in goals 5 times (most often 9th or 10th), something 75 players have done. Even with all those 17 30-goal seasons, he was actually just top-20 in goal scoring 9 times, something 47 players have done. Sometimes he was as low as 45th in goals, but we look back at that "30" and see it as something special, but it wasn't. So he was a good goal scorer, but probably about the
8th-best regular season goalscorer of his generation, with peak and longevity both considered, behind Lemieux, Gretzky, Bossy, Robitaille, Yzerman, Goulet & Kurri.
But Gartner's generation (as I've defined it) is one of a dozen or so to have come and gone throughout the history of hockey. Don't dismiss earlier times just because scoring was lower or schedules were shorter. Many players with more impressive/dominant goal scoring records have played since Gartner, and many did before him. recognizing that more of the best players in history can be found in modern generations, I'm not going to just take the 8 from above and multiply it by 12. Let's go with 6 and say he's approximately the
48th-best regular season goalscorer of all-time.
But then, of course goals are not everything. you can say goals are more important than assists, but:
1) for the elite players of history, who tend to have a lot to do with every point they earn, an assist is arguably worth as much as a goal, and
2) points are indisputably worth more than goals.
Because he was never a player to get a lot of assists, Mike Gartner was top-20 in points just twice in his long career: 11th and 17th. I don't have to tell you that many, many players have a record of elite point production stronger than that. If looking at point production, Gartner probably drops to approximately the
150th-best regular season point producing forward of all-time.
Although offense in the regular season is nice, players with a playoff record of solid production are rightfully revered in hockey history. This doesn't mean Claude Lemieux is better than Gartner, but it does mean that a handful of players in history with regular season resumes close to Gartner's are "greater" players of all-time once their playoff records are considered. Let's say there are 10 of those. Making Gartner the
160th-best point producing forward of all-time.
Although offense is the most important thing for a forward, defense is important too. that doesn't mean Mike Grier is better than Gartner, but there are probably a good 10 more players in history whose offensive resumes closer to his, whose defensive skills make them better overall players than Gartner, making him the
170th-best forward of all-time.
Finally, the reality of hockey is that positions other than forward have as much of an impact on the game. Any serious all-time list should include a reasonable proportion of forwards, defensemen and goalies. If 60% of the players on an all-time list are forwards, then you're at approximately 280 before you get to the 170th forward. So you could say Mike Gartner is approximately the
280th-best player of all-time.
These are not meant to be exact figures, but just an illustration of how easy it is to run out of room for a player on a short and exclusive list like this. Though I do believe Mike Gartner should fall into the 280 range.
If you take a look at the all-time draft, a fantasy league where the best players of today and tomorrow come together to be drafted by 32 of the brightest hockey history minds on this board, Gartner was passed over 293 times before being selected. This is a competitive group of GMs, determined to outdo their colleagues in drafting and research and earn the title belt for the year. So if any of these 32 GMs thought he was much better than that, they'd have put their money where their mouth was, so to speak.
http://hfboards.mandatory.com/showthread.php?t=1114841
