I don't think you accounted for PPO. Looking at your "dissertation," it seems you responded to a charge of doing mathematical gymnastics to prop up Lemieux, by doing even more mathematical gymnastics to prop up Lemieux. You accounted for 88-89 Lemieux playing in an ultra high PP environment by imagining a season where he goes from 6 PPO/GP to 5 PPO/GP. From ultra high to very high.
It might be a fine adjustment for comparing 88-89 Lemieux against 88-89 competition. But it seems patently unfair to peaks from Gretzky, Howe, McDavid, Lafleur, etc., who never played in such bountiful PPO environments (remember there are other players, and calculations should be made to try to reasonably assess as many of them as possible, not just for to benefit people with a yellow 66 on their back.) Perhaps a reasonable course of action would be to figure out what everyone looks like in a 250 PPO environment (which is a nice round number and basically the PPO levels we've seen in recent history).
His super
bountiful PPO's amounts
to
72 powerplays an increase of
18.8% from the norm. Reduce his powerplay points by that amount and that gives you 66 or 67 powerplay points, a loss of
12 to 13. So what happens to those
72 powerplays worth of time? Lemieux would not just be sitting on his butt watching the game from the bench during that time. Obviously he's out there playing shifts at even strength instead. All one needs to know is what his EV & PP per 60 rates were. You also seem to think that his EV scoring rate was somehow low, which is strange... how many players are out there getting 102 EV points in 76 games? In a high powerplay season to boot. How could that possibly make him a bad ES scorer? If you follow the math you'll see that his ES rate could not possibly have been much lower than his PP rate that season because of how much time he was playing on the PP
and PK. Even if he was playing a ridiculous 30 minutes a game it, which is unlikely as increased special teams time has
zero correlation with total ice time, he would score 1 EV Pt per 1.6 PP Pt which means he makes up
at least 8 of those lost powerplay points. You don't have to trust me, just simply follow the math that's what the numbers will tell you.
Also did you miss the part about how the Pens had to deal with just as many
bountiful PKO's as they had powerplays? Lemieux was the Pens primary Penalty Killer meaning he was out there for a large portion of his ice time playing in a situations where scoring rates are much lower than at even strength. When you normalize his PK numbers to the league average that increases his point totals so that in the end he doesn't lose very few points or none at all.
Okay, well looking at the year by year Top 10 on hockey reference, it seems that Mark Recchi was 10th place in 1992-93 with 123 points. Any other years with 10 123-point scorers out there? Or 10 117-point scorers, if you want to adjust for 80 games.
In the Top 10, we see career highs for Lafontaine, Oates, Selanne, Turgeon, Mogilny, Gilmour, Robitaille and Recchi. 8 career highs, plus a PPG high for Lemieux. Only Yzerman ever beat his 1993 score, and his 137 points are as close to his 88-89 peak as he ever got, and far better than what he had been doing in the 2 previous seasons. So many top scorers are scoring like they've never scored before and never would again, yet you don't see any red flags?
It's not just the extra 4 games, there was more top end talent in the league and expansion and an abnormally high amount of star players were healthy that season. More games + good health and high number of games against defensively weak expansion teams = more players having career seasons.
Here's the thing about that; many of the numbers that were put up in '93 may have been inflated but that doesn't mean Lemieux's were because he
benefited a disproportionally smaller amount than every single one of the top 22 scorers.
Every single one of them benefited substantially more than Lemieux did - he only got to play 5 games against those teams, while the rest had close to a dozen.
If Lemieux had got to play against the expansions teams as much as some of the others did he could have had
170 points in 60 that season. I've added a link to all of their player pages showing their splits in case there is any doubt about the numbers below.
Player | Games | Points |
| 13 | 28 |
| 16 | 27 |
| 14 | 27 |
| 11 | 27 |
| 14 | 24 |
| 12 | 23 |
| 11 | 23 |
| 13 | 22 |
| 12 | 20 |
| 12 | 20 |
| 12 | 20 |
| 12 | 19 |
| 7 | 19 |
| 14 | 18 |
| 12 | 18 |
| 12 | 18 |
| 9 | 18 |
| 5 | 18 |
| 11 | 16 |
| 8 | 16 |
| 7 | 15 |
| 8 | 10 |
Taking it one step further, this is how many points the top 22 players would've had if we take away those 4 extra games plus the games against the expansion teams and then prorate their remaining totals to 80. No adjustments for scoring levels.
| | gm | G | A | PT |
1 | Lemieux | 60 | 64 | 91 | 155 |
2 | Lafontine | 80 | 47 | 87 | 134 |
3 | Oates | 80 | 45 | 84 | 129 |
4 | Selanne | 80 | 71 | 53 | 125 |
5 | Gilmour | 79 | 30 | 92 | 122 |
6 | Turgeon | 79 | 51 | 70 | 121 |
7 | Yzerman | 80 | 51 | 70 | 121 |
8 | Mogilny | 73 | 72 | 47 | 118 |
9 | Robitalle | 80 | 57 | 56 | 113 |
10 | Sundin | 76 | 42 | 69 | 111 |
11 | Recchi | 80 | 48 | 60 | 108 |
12 | Stevens | 68 | 52 | 48 | 100 |
13 | Tocchet | 76 | 46 | 54 | 100 |
14 | Janney | 80 | 21 | 79 | 100 |
15 | Roenick | 80 | 43 | 54 | 97 |
16 | Bure | 79 | 52 | 42 | 94 |
17 | Hull | 76 | 50 | 44 | 94 |
18 | Sakic | 74 | 42 | 53 | 94 |
19 | Juneau | 80 | 30 | 63 | 93 |
20 | Andreychuk | 79 | 52 | 39 | 91 |
21 | Francis | 80 | 22 | 67 | 89 |
22 | Fleury | 79 | 27 | 54 | 81 |
While Gretzky and Lemieux are least affected by adjusted points disparities (they scored the most, and Lemieux comes into the decade late) it gets goofier the further down we go. It seems that 6th place 73 game Lindros year is better than any 80 game season season Mike Bossy ever had, and would be good enough to steal an Art Ross from Guy Lafleur. Heck, Pierre Turgeon tied for 17th in 1995-96, but apparently that level of play would be good enough to be a top 5 scorer in multiple years in the 1980s or to steal an Art Ross or two from Bobby Hull. At least, according to adjusted points
We all know Hockey References adjusted totals are not an accurate method of comparison.
Not once have I referred to their adjustment system for any of the numbers I've posted.
How many other years have career highs from so many people who suddenly obliterate their 2nd best year?
Lets look at all these players and the real reason why most of them had career years.
Expansion - LaFontaine -Naturally you'd expect him to hit his peak around age 26-27 so no surprise that 91-92 & 92-93 were his best seasons. The only difference from the season prior was he was fully healthy and added scoring against the expansion teams with
27 points in 11. Take that away and he has 121 in 73 = 1.66ppg pretty much the same pace he had the year before at 1.63 - while battling injuries! But his goal scoring was much higher in 91-92. In 92-93 he ended up with 53 goals in 84(pace of 49 w/o expansion gms) while he was on pace for
68 goals(projected to 84gm) in 91-92. It's clearly 92-93 was a career season thanks to being healthy and the expansion team games. Afterwards his career was completely derailed by injuries and he was never the same.
NO - Oates - Not actually his peak season, his production was higher in 90-91;
1.89 vs 1.69 points per game in a
lower scoring season, the real difference was he was just healthy in 92-93 Additionally he had 23 pts in 11 against expansion, 119 in 73 otherwise. But look at the goal total right? Well he scored more because he shot more; went from a little over 2 shots a game to 3, somebody had to score for the Bruins.
NO - Yzerman - Clearly not his career season, 88-89 blows it out of the water. 87-88 is also right there with '93, it's just the injury that prevented him from putting up the same numbers. His stats were likewise also Inflated thanks to all those games and points against the expansion teams - 13 games in total, that's almost 3 times as many that Lemieux got and with that he lead the league with 28 points against them. Without these games this season would've been only his
4th best by ppg.
Due to DPE - Selänne - Sure, a career season for him in raw numbers. But only because his peak came in a very low scoring era. I mean what did you expect? Him to score 130 points in the dead puck era??
YES - Turgeon - Peak season no doubt, but it's normal to expect at least few star players to have a peak season
every year.
TIED (+expansion factor) - Gilmour - Helped out by playing the most games amongst the top player against the expansion teams; 16 of them. When adjusted for PP/EV/SH scoring levels he matches his totals the following year. The point being; he doesn't have abnormally higher points this year after adjusting for scoring levels and scoring against expansion teams.
TIED (+expansion factor) - Mogilny - Same deal as with Gilmour expect his matching season was 95-96 instead. Also playing with three HHOF's on the top line and powerplay probably helps out a guys point totals out a little bit. People don't realize that he was scoring at
almost the same level the season before once he teamed up with LaFontaine & Andreychuck. Everyone seems to continently forget Mogilny broke his freaking leg and up tore his ankle ligaments in the post season in '93, those
ARE NOT light injuries to recover from. Add to that when he did play in 93-94 & 94-95 he was without
both LaFontaine(most of the time) & Andreychuck. But he came back in 95-96 with a season almost just as good.
Hockey Reference's basic adjustments say both seasons are equal in points;
62-41-103 vs
53-50-103
When adjusted by ES/PP/SH to 95-96 scoring levels 92-93 still come out on top by a little
66-44-110 vs
55-52-107
The difference is entirely due to expansion games, having scored 11 goals & 20 points in 9 gm
TIED (+expansion factor) - Robitaille - Career year sure, was also his age 26 season you'd expect him to peak. Once again expansion teams came to his rescue, especially on the goal scoring front with 11 in 12. Minus expansion and prorate to 80 he's at 57-56-113 basically matched that in 87-88 with 53-58-111
NO - Recchi - Was just as productive in 90-91 which was a
lower scoring season to boot - playing 6 more games is what made the difference Also while he only played 7 games against the expansion teams he milked his chances against them the most of anyone scoring 2.7 points per game against them,
more than double his pace against the rest 104 in 77.
Without those factors this is how the seasons compare;
90-91 78 40-73-113
92-93 80 48-60-108
Due to DPE - Sundin - Same as Selanne, had the misfortune of playing most of his career in the DPE otherwise there's a good could have bested this year.
NO - Stevens - No better than the year before when he had the same ppg in a
lower scoring season. Also his age 26 and 27 seasons i.e his expected prime. If it was so much easier to score why didn't he improve his per game pace as much as Lemieux did?
NO - Bure - Only a career year because he played 7 more games, higher gpg & ppg next year in a lower scoring season and likely beats it multiple times later if not for the crappy dead puck era. Goal scoring also a little inflated by scoring 13 in 12 vs expansion teams 47 in 71 otherwise.
Without those factors this is how the two seasons compare;
92-93 79 52-42-94
93-94 76 60-47-107
Inline with increase - Tocchet - Marginally better on a per game pace than earlier years, very much in line with the marginal increase in scoring. Big difference in point totals simply because he was healthy for the entire season
for once in his career lol. Playing with Mario also helps
NO - Roenick - Just as good the in both the year before
and the next year. Worse when simply removing expansion and games played, remember this is with no adjustments for scoring levels!
91-92 80 53-50-103
92-93 80 43-54-97
93-94 84 46-61-107
Inline with increase - Janney - Marginally better ppg in line with the slightly higher scoring levels vs several other years + Being healthy/extra games
Tied - Juneau - Slightly more productive in a slightly higher scoring year, perfectly inline with expectations for age 25-26 seasons + Being healthy and extra games
NO - Andreychuk Just as good the following year and the year prior in a
lower scoring seasons
NO - Sakic - Much more productive in future seasons
NO - Hull - Way less productive than previous seasons
NO - Fleury
NO - Francis
Also, doesn't Iain Fyffe already have breakdowns of ES/PP/PK ice time somewhere?
Who's numbers do you think I used? Fyffe's. I have a link to his 1988-89 page posted in the thread.
They did make an impact. The guys who helped Lemieux in 92-93 helped Cullen too. John Cullen isn't outscoring Brett Hull unless he's put in a VERY advantageous position to score points - and that's what Pittsburgh apparently gave to it's #1 centre.
Who said anything about 1992-93 in regards to Cullen? My first response to you was about Lemieux's situation in 1988-89 not 1992-93. Vastly different seasons with vastly different supporting casts.
I haven't got the time to analyze your TOI breakdown, but if you want a greater understanding - run those numbers to see how each of the Gretzky and Lemieux seasons in your poll fare in a 250 PPO environment.
Reducing the number of powerplay opportunities doesn't change anything. You have to remember if that season had a lower number of PPO's that means it also had a lower number of PKO's. In turn Lemieux loses
both PP and PK time.
Playing in a ridiclous 30 minutes a game his scoring rates would be something like this
| Overall | EV | PP | SH |
TOI per game | 30:00 | 16:20 | 7:54 | 5:46 |
plays in PPO's/PKO's | | | 400ish of 455 | 270ish of 456 |
Total mins | 2280 | 1241.3 | 600.4 | 438.3 |
Points | 199 | 102 | 79 | 18 |
Points per 60 | 5.27 | 4.93 | 7.89 | 2.46 |
PP/EV ratio of
1.6 to 1
EV/SH ratio of
2.0 to 1
He plays in about 180 less powerplays and loses points at a ratio of 1 to 1.6
But he also plays in 120 less PKO's and gains twice the number of points at even strength
Run the nunbers and see what happens. You can just continue to ignore the second part of that equation.