The question I have is why do we make excuses for Crosby missing significant time, while simultaneously cooing over his 2013-2014 season when 4 of the top 6 players in PPG behind him missed significant time, which is the only reason that the gap in scoring is as large as it was at face value?
Malkin, Tavares, Stamkos, and Zetterberg missed 22, 23, 45, and 37 games respectively. The pace hounds would give them 96, 90, 87, 85 points if they played the 80 games Crosby did.
Coincidentally, the #3 and #7 PPG leaders played less games than Crosby as well, and would inch Getzlaf up to 90 and Hall up to 85 in 80 games.
Were it not for an unusual amount of missed games for each of the players directly behind him in PPG, that 19.5% turns into a still good, but more ordinary 8.3% and 8 point win over his teammate and a 15.6% win over the closest non-teammate, assuming they all played the 80 games Crosby did.
That’s of course ignoring what those injuries did to their overall play.
For instance, Malkin had 41 points in his first 32 games (34 Penguins games). According to the pace merchants, that’s good for 103 points in 80 games. He then missed 9 games. Came back and had 31 points in 28 games. Missed the final 11 games of the season.
The big one is Stamkos, who was coming off a run of 4 consecutive seasons where he was either 1st or 2nd in goals, was top 5 in points all four years, and was runner up in the Art Ross the previous two seasons. He was 1st in goals and points in 2013-2014 before going down with an injury that altered his trajectory forever. Where is the romanticism for him? Where are the projections that he could have rocked Crosby that very season?
If Crosby is given every pass in the world for injuries, pace, missed time, and gets as much credit as he does, the same courtesy should be extended to his peers when he was healthy and they were injured.
I think I have answered some of your questions in my latest posts, but one thing I find really interesting is the Stamkos shout out.
Stamkos from 2010 to 2013 was unequivocally Crosby’s top threat. He was absolutely the real deal and I feel like that version of him gets really underrated on here. That might be due to the lack of flashy 3 digit totals that other superstars achieved, which can be explained by playing in a lower scoring era. To me, that version of Stamkos was better than any version of MacKinnon in any 4 straight years we have seen so far.
With that being said, Stamkos’ main issue was his really putrid consistency from the first half of the season to the last half. In almost every season he’s played from 2010 to 2013, he had performed significantly better in one half, while being much less productive in the other:
2009-2010
39 pts in 41 GP - 0,95 PPG
56 pts in 41 GP - 1,37 PPG
2010-2011
56 pts in 41 GP - 1,37 PPG
35 pts in 41 GP - 0,85 PPG
2011-2012
47 pts in 41 GP - 1,15 PPG
50 pts in 41 GP - 1,22 PPG
2012-2013 (48 games)
35 pts in 24 GP - 1,46 PPG
22 pts in 24 GP - 0,92 PPG
2013-2014
23 pts in 17 GP - 1,35 PPG
17 pts in 20 GP - 0,85 PPG
So basically, every time Stamkos scored at a higher clip than 1,30 PPG during a half, he proceeded to struggle to even reach point-per-game production for the other half of a season. If we use the prior years data from the previous years, it’s unlikely that Stamkos could have maintained the same pace of 1,35 PPG for all of the 2013-2014 season.
The 2013-2014 season data might be a bit skewed because of his injury when coming back, but unlike Crosby, he wasn’t able to produce at the same rate as before, after he returned from his injury. As proven by his subsequent seasons, that leg injury prevented him from being one of the top players post 2005 lockout and potentially inserting himself as the 3rd best player after Crosby and Ovechkin (pre McDavid).
So in retrospect, Malkin was really the only one that could’ve given Crosby a run for the scoring title that year, even though him playing the 22 games he missed probably would’ve boasted Crosby’s numbers even more with his help on the powerplay, so the effect probably evens out.
