We already know the arguments for Gretzky, and he had the better career. Lemieux dominated against butterfly goalies and trap era defense, Gretzky never put up more than 50 goals there so that's a pretty decent argument. If you can't see that it's fine I'm not trying to persuade you, but technically Lemieux is the best player that ever lived.
23 year old Lemieux outscored Gretzky by 31 points in 2 less games during his 27-28 year old season, unless you believe Gretzky declined significantly by then (which he clearly didn't) it's pretty shortsighted to say Lemieux has no argument for atleast being as good as Gretzky at his best.
I don't totally get your argument. You're comparing one all time talent entering his prime years with another all time talent exiting his peak.
The basic counter is that Gretzky had the better age 23 season (and 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, and so on).
You're comparing Gretzky at age 28, season 10, and year 1 on a new team with Lemieux at age 23 and season 5.
I think some context is needed. Lemieux had played 292 games going into that season.
Gretzky had already racked up 816 games including the playoffs. That's nearly as many games as Mario played over his entire 13 year career before his 2000-2001 comeback season.
He only missed 8 games in his first 8 seasons in Edmonton. He missed 16 in his final season in Edmonton due to a knee injury (he had a 14 point lead over Lemieux before going down for basically all of January). This was his first real injury and it can easily be argued that this is where he lost some pep in his step because he scored just 10 goals in his remaining 26 games, after putting up 30 in his first 38 games (he had scored at 60-90 goal pace for 7 straight years- the second half of 1980-1981 with 34 in 39 games, 92, 71, 87, 73, 52 (set a personal goal of dropping over 2 assists per game), 62, and 30 in 38 first half half games).
You don't think that playing complete season after complete season and playing 10 years of hockey straight condensed into 9 years is going to factor in at all?
You think it's a coincidence that after the sheer of amount of games played in combination with the Suter hit, Gretzky never hit 40 goals again or 100 assists or 2 PPG (or even above 130 points)? You really think that it was because Gretzky met his match when it comes to goalies/defense, and not injuries that altered his career forever and standard old age in addition to playing hundreds upon hundreds of games more?
Yes, Lemieux had his own health issues of course! We write an essay about that too. He's my second favorite player after Gretzky, how can he not be? I dream about a player demonstrating either one's dominance to any degree again. I understand the what ifs when it comes to Mario, but damn I can't stand it when people act like Gretzky couldn't hang later on in his career, for any other reason than age, a bad back, and mileage.
As a broken down, shell of his former self, he put up 97 points at age 36 and finished tied for 4th in scoring. And as always, because I try to be fair and provide proper context, Jagr/Forsberg/Lindros all missed significant time and surely would have finished ahead of him otherwise. But I would hope so! They were all 23/24 years old. Even an alternate scenario where he finished 7th in scoring is impressive. He put up 90 points at age 37 and finished tied for 3rd in scoring. With more games, the only obvious ones to finish ahead of him would be Selanne and Lindros again, and possibly Turgeon. He was 5th in Hart voting. These were not exactly the greatest teams.
It's willing petty ignorance to pull down Gretzky to prop up Lemieux by saying that one could do it in a more defensive era while the other couldn't. He proved enough that at an advanced age with his own personal history and mileage, that he was still one of the best players in the game. I'm supposed to say that he couldn't have done it when he was still putting up point totals good enough for top 3-5 (with key injuries to the most talented players of that time period) or top 6-8 assuming those injured players put up their own great point totals, all of whom were a 12-14 years his junior?
That's absolutely ludicrous.
This isn't the simple case of Wayne having better stats than Mario merely because he played longer. He beat him to every single significant goal, assist, point, trophy, awards, championships, and so on milestone. He has years where he factually lost out on more awards because people were getting tired of his dominance.
Only player I would ever take over Mario is Gretzky. There's no shame in that.
