Mike Bossy was a better goal scorer than Wayne Gretzky

[Staniowski]

No they weren't. For a very simple reason: Gretzky put the puck in the net way more than all of them.

Gretzky blew Bossy away. This is where HOH gets carried away: crunching numbers to create embarrassing hot takes and attempt to overturn self-evident facts.

I think if there was a poll, here, about this - Gretzky vs Bossy as goal-scorers, Gretzky would win a huge majority....probably 95%. And if you were to do the same poll 5 years from now, Gretzky would win an even bigger majority.

But if you were to poll only those people who saw both of them play, Bossy would win....or if there had been a poll in the 1980s, Bossy would have won.

 

[NyQuil]

I think if there was a poll, here, about this - Gretzky vs Bossy as goal-scorers, Gretzky would win a huge majority....probably 95%. And if you were to do the same poll 5 years from now, Gretzky would win an even bigger majority.

But if you were to poll only those people who saw both of them play, Bossy would win....or if there had been a poll in the 1980s, Bossy would have won.

The irony is that if Gretzky had put up fewer assists, he’d have won the poll.

You ask people what they think about Al MacInnis’ playmaking and all they can think about is his slap shot when he had almost 1,000 assists.

 

[Staniowski]

When you mention Krutov, I feel like this conversation is fighting with individual posters 'gestalt' or 'police composite' of what a "goal scorer" should be or look like, not actually the player who scores the most goals.

It's almost like we're conceptually rebuilding a proto Brett Hull, a guy whose got the great touch around the net, bullet wrister and slapper. But not too many garbage goals to be downgraded to a Dave Andreychuk, but not too flashy to be bumped up to a Pavel Bure who relied on too many other athletic gifts. And throw out Gretzky or even Lemieux because let's face it, they had elite playmaking as well and their default switch isn't to shoot.

It could be a more interesting conversation if we're talking shop about goal scoring styles, but it's just missing the most obvious and true conclusion. I'm not even a Gretzky fan per se, but trying to define a goal scorer as everything but Gretz is a little... urgh I dunno.

The only definition of a good goal-scorer is a player who scores against good competition. You can proceed to discuss certain attributes that make a good goal-scorer, if you wish, but it's essentially just a player who can score goals.

All the guys you mentioned are good goal-scorers. Garbage goals are good, flashy goals are good, goals scored by great playmakers are good....they're all good. As long as you can do it against good defense, etc.

 

[Yozhik v tumane]

Wouldn't every team do that?

If the Oilers were so overpowering 4 on 4 I’d probably avoid it.

 

[bobholly39]

I think if there was a poll, here, about this - Gretzky vs Bossy as goal-scorers, Gretzky would win a huge majority....probably 95%. And if you were to do the same poll 5 years from now, Gretzky would win an even bigger majority.

But if you were to poll only those people who saw both of them play, Bossy would win....or if there had been a poll in the 1980s, Bossy would have won.

How much of that is bias/perception because Bossy is more of a "pure" goal-scorer though?

This isn't the best parallel - but if I asked you whose the better goal-scorer, McDavid or Pastrnak, who do you pick? I bet most people would say Pastrnak. Would it surprise you to know that McDavid has 214 goals in 441 career games, vs 216 goals for Pastrnak but in 473? Definitely not an exact parallel - but Pastrnak more of a pure goal scorer, McDavid overall offense - yet McDavid has scored more goals per game so far. Obviously with Gretzky vs Bossy - the disparity was a lot bigger (with better single season totals, like 92 and 87 also, and more actual goals too).

But - perception-wise, people think of Pastrnak more of a goal-scorer, just like they probably did Bossy.

I still say - if you want to consider the majority of the arguments presented in this thread (whether it's Bossy having better goal-scoring "skills", or being able to score "harder goals", etc) - it's impossible to not also give Gretzky the benefit of the doubt based on being more a playmaker first.

If Gretzky had the luxury of playing as a goal-scoring winger, vs as a playmaking center, he'd score a lot more goals. Would Bossy be able to score certain "harder" goals better than Gretzky? Maybe. But would Gretzky outdo him in sheer volume, by using his high iq to get that many more goals? Almost surely.

I think the very best argument for Bossy vs Gretzky would have been that Gretzky had a very sharp decline in goal-scoring in second half of his career. Problem is - it's impossible to hold that against him vs Bossy - who retired early. 0 goals is 0 goals, even if we all were to believe Bossy could have aged better as a goal-scorer

 

[The Panther]

I think Gretzky in his prime did all right against @Staniowski's mysterious "good defence", which he apparently thinks only Bossy succeeded with.

1979-80 arguably isn't Gretzky's "prime" yet, and he did score large volumes of goals against clubs not known for their defence (Detroit, L.A., Pittsburgh, Quebec, Toronto, Winnipeg), but he also scored 8 goals in 8 games (and 17 points!) against the Islanders and Canadiens. (Did those clubs have "good defence"?)

Anyway, Gretzky's next 8 seasons (1980-81 to 1986-88): How did he do vs. "good defence"? So, I'm too lazy to do a year by year, but the top six clubs, defensively, for those eight years in sum are: Montreal, Philly, Boston, NY Islanders, Washington, and Buffalo. Here's how Wayne did:

vs. Montreal = 14/24
vs. Philly = 26/23
vs. Boston = 12/23
vs. NY Islanders = 14/22
vs. Washington = 17/22
vs. Buffalo = 14/25

For, for these seven years, vs. the top defensive clubs, Gretzky scored 97 goals in 139 games, or 56 goals per 80 games played.

I don't know what Bossy's comparable numbers are for his best eight seasons (1978-79 through 1985-86), but since he averaged 62 or 63 goals per 80 games in that period, I very much doubt his average against the top six defensive clubs is as high as Gretzky's. I'm simply too tired right now to check.

 

[ContrarianGoaltender]

I think Gretzky in his prime did all right against @Staniowski's mysterious "good defence", which he apparently thinks only Bossy succeeded with.

1979-80 arguably isn't Gretzky's "prime" yet, and he did score large volumes of goals against clubs not known for their defence (Detroit, L.A., Pittsburgh, Quebec, Toronto, Winnipeg), but he also scored 8 goals in 8 games (and 17 points!) against the Islanders and Canadiens. (Did those clubs have "good defence"?)

Anyway, Gretzky's next 8 seasons (1980-81 to 1986-88): How did he do vs. "good defence"? So, I'm too lazy to do a year by year, but the top six clubs, defensively, for those eight years in sum are: Montreal, Philly, Boston, NY Islanders, Washington, and Buffalo. Here's how Wayne did:

vs. Montreal = 14/24
vs. Philly = 26/23
vs. Boston = 12/23
vs. NY Islanders = 14/22
vs. Washington = 17/22
vs. Buffalo = 14/25

For, for these seven years, vs. the top defensive clubs, Gretzky scored 97 goals in 139 games, or 56 goals per 80 games played.

I don't know what Bossy's comparable numbers are for his best eight seasons (1978-79 through 1985-86), but since he averaged 62 or 63 goals per 80 games in that period, I very much doubt his average against the top six defensive clubs is as high as Gretzky's. I'm simply too tired right now to check.

I completely agree with you that Gretzky was an outstanding performer against the best teams, in the playoffs, internationally, everywhere. The point isn't that Gretzky wasn't great, the point is that Bossy was an absolute goal-scoring weapon, especially against the best levels of competition, in a way that people who focus only on regular season goal scoring numbers really don't seem to understand.

Not sure if you tabulated those numbers by hand, but if you did just letting you know that you can run them very easily on NHL.com. Here's the report for top teams by GA/GP from 1977-78 to 1985-86, for example. The top six are exactly as the same as on your list, and since Bossy played on the Islanders let's replace them with #7 Chicago. Now we can run Bossy against each opponent (e.g. against Montreal):

vs Montreal: 20 in 24
vs Buffalo: 16 in 30
vs Philadelphia: 40 in 56
vs Boston: 28 in 32
vs Washington: 53 in 52
vs Chicago: 33 in 32

Total: 190 in 226 (67 per 80)

You should certainly not be assuming that Bossy's numbers drop off substantially based on the level of competition. I've looked at all the best goal scorers throughout history, and Mike Bossy is the one whose production holds up the best against top opposition, sometimes to an almost absurd degree.

During the first three years of Bossy's career, here are two of his splits. One of them was against the teams that finished in the bottom 5 in the standings that season. The other was against teams with an SRS rating of 0.50 or higher (i.e. strong teams that would be expected to have a goal differential of +40 or better against an average schedule):

GP	G	A	P
62	53	32	85
61	52	36	87

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

I'm not even going to bother labelling which one is which, because it's not even necessary to make my point.

All that said, it's not impossible to find a split involving top teams where Gretzky is ahead of Bossy, I posted one earlier for example (where during Gretzky's peak he narrowly edged Bossy against one possible definition of top opposition). I am sure there are other cutoffs and time periods that would yield a result where Gretzky has a slight advantage, at least in terms of regular season goal production before looking at any kind of further situational analysis. But in virtually every extended sample you will ever look at, Bossy's splits between the best and worst opposition are going to be much narrower than Gretzky's when it comes to goal scoring.

There are two ways to interpret this: 1. Gretzky couldn't handle the best opponents, or 2. Bossy didn't try as hard to score against the worst teams. Considering Gretzky is the greatest playoff performer of all time, I think the second option is very clearly the more accurate description. Gretzky had an unstoppable motor and the Oilers played pond hockey during the regular season, while the Islanders rolled their lines while playing within a defined system in the more defensive Conference. In my opinion, some of Bossy's seemingly "best" seasons are merely the seasons where he scored more meaningless goals against the worst teams (1981-82, for example).

Again, it's fine if you think Gretzky was a better goal scorer based on your own personal player ranking philosophy. I still think almost everyone in this thread with that opinion is exaggerating the actual gap though, because they are putting too much weight on the regular season numbers, which partially measure goal scoring ability, partially measure how good you are hockey overall, and partially measure how hard you are trying to score on the Colorado Rockies on Tuesday nights in February when your team is leading the division by 20 points.

 

[seventieslord]

Completely fair objection. I think we probably have a base-level philosophical difference here, but I am interested in your perspective if you don't mind getting down into the details a bit.

I was curious, as a historian, do you think that @Staniowski 's claim in this thread is accurate that many contemporary hockey observers during the 1980s would have rated Bossy over Gretzky as a goal scorer? And if that is the case, what do you think they were evaluating under "goal scoring" that we aren't today, considering that they pretty obviously didn't think that the raw stats were the primary factor back then, and given that the current HOH consensus seems to be that Gretzky should be rated as superior?

I don't know for sure the temperature of the room in 1983-85, because I was in preschool around that time - but contemporary quotes about Bossy seem to call him "the best pure goal scorer". That's a nebulous term that drives a lot of us crazy, but what I believe it most often means is, out of all the players who mainly just score goals, he's the best one at it. I don't believe terms like that necessarily mean to include players who do so much more for their teams, like Gretzky and Lemieux. You often heard the term used to describe Rocket Richard - "Gordie is the better all-around player, but for pure goal-scoring, give me the rocket", or Pavel Bure, or Brett Hull, so I think that's a fair sense of what it means.

But I don't think it's accurate to say that there are a lot of contemporary opinions between 1981 and 1985 that "I know Gretzky scores about 33% more goals per game, but Bossy is the better goal scorer. I don't mean better PURE goal scorer, I mean ABSOLUTELY better!"

I'm not as good of a scout as many others here, but I'm surprised that you think Gretzky was better than Bossy at most of the things on your list. My immediate intuition was the exact opposite, that Bossy was better at most of them but Gretzky was probably much better at a few of them. (EDIT-Might have misread your post a bit here, could be that we agree).

I don't. I see you've edited this since then, but just to be clear, I said he was better at enough of them to a large enough degree. It all depends on the degrees, really, it could just take one thing. If he could shoot the puck 130 mph, for example, that might override all other factors. I did include a few things in there that seemed to apply specifically to Gretzky more than anyone else, to help explain what I think made him a better goal scorer. I'm sure you can guess which ones.

That's the thing about Gretzky, certain things he did were simply off the charts. Anyone who has pondered making an all-time hockey video game or just rating all-time players in a number of key skill categories has probably noticed the same thing - that in order to make it so that Gretzky is one of the three best overall players in the game/thought experiment, some of his skills need to break the scale. If you give him a 7/10 in speed, a 6 in shot power, a 2 in physicality, a 4 in defense, there's just no way for him to make up ground on dozens of other players who either excel at everything or have no major weakness. How would he ever pull ahead of Bourque, Harvey, Howe, Orr, even Lemieux, who's basically a 10 in every offensive attribute? the answer is he has to be, like, a 15 in passing, in hockey sense, in offensive awareness or whatever it is you want to call it. He was not better than everyone at everything, but being so much better than everyone else at just a couple of things is what made him (probably) the best ever. And that's kind of how it is with his goal scoring too. It's all the mental parts of it, because it's not really his physical attributes that drive it, like most other great scorers.

Also, if we're going so far as to include things like playmaking in a player's goal scoring ability, are there are any offensive micro skills at all that are excluded? Do you think that there is a risk that if we go too "macro" in our definition, that we are no longer rating how good the player is at goal scoring, and instead simply how good that player is at offensive production? And does the "he could have scored more goals" argument go the other way? Like, should I view Alex Ovechkin as a superior playmaker to Nicklas Backstrom in 2007-08 because Ovechkin scored way more goals while being not too far behind in assists, even though he clearly could have chosen to pass the puck more often?

I don't think there is much of a need to micromanage comparisons like this. I'm not concerned with cases where a player had 10-20% more goals or assists than another tipping the scales in a goalscoring or playmaking comparison. This only comes up with Gretzky because of his magnitude. There are very few players who were off the charts - Gretzky and Lemieux are obvious ones, Howe is right there too (I disagree Richard was a better goal scorer; similar to this discussion I think Howe was not only better at pure goalscoring, but also could have been even better because he also was the game's best playmaker while exceeding Richard's goalscoring exploits).

As it applies to 2008 Ovechkin, absolutely, it's entirely possible that OV at his absolute peak was so impactful that it made him a more effective playmaker than the rookie version of Backstrom , who had what is still the worst goal-scoring season of his career, as he probably deferred to OV much more. OV could just about do no wrong for about three seasons there, and he was able to score a boatload of goals while not seeing grossly disproportionate results from an assists or goals against standpoint, either. Of course, everything that happens on the ice affects everything else, and OV can no longer do all three effectively - he had to choose one. For the majority of their careers, of course, Backstrom has been the superior playmaker.

 

[Johnny Engine]

I don't know for sure the temperature of the room in 1983-85, because I was in preschool around that time - but contemporary quotes about Bossy seem to call him "the best pure goal scorer". That's a nebulous term that drives a lot of us crazy, but what I believe it most often means is, out of all the players who mainly just score goals, he's the best one at it.

I think that's the most logical definition for the word, or at least the one that comes closest to justifying the need for such a distinction, but it goes in different direction when you hear people talking up someone as "the purest goal scorer in the game" as if it's a good thing to be. By your definition, the purest scorer in the game would be someone like Roman Oksiuta who's just completely useless on almost every square inch of the rink, but instead it seems to refer to a platonic idea of what the act of scoring goals should look like.

 

[The Panther]

@ContrarianGoaltender 's post (above) is interesting and makes some good points for Bossy's argument here. I ran Bossy's numbers for 1978-79 through 1985-86 (also eight seasons, like my Gretzky example, above), and came up with this:

Bossy (1978-79 to 1985-86)
vs. Montreal = 22/26
vs. Buffalo = 12/25
vs. Philadelphia = 34/50
vs. Boston = 25/28
vs. Washington = 46/48
vs. Chicago = 29/28

In total, Bossy scored 168 goals in 209 games, a fabulous pace of 64 goals per 80 games. (Reminder, Gretzky's total was pacing for 56 per 80 games.)

So, advantage Bossy by this metric. I can't help feeling, though, that this is a little unfair to Gretzky because we're including the Islanders as his opponent and replacing that with Chicago for Bossy, which is a big difference. So, let me run the Gretzky numbers again, including Chicago but deleting the Islanders (I realize this is a little silly because nobody thinks of Chicago as "good defence" in the 80s, but anyway just to level the field here a little more):

Gretzky (1980-81 to 1987-88)
vs. Montreal = 14/24
vs. Buffalo = 14/25
vs. Philadelphia = 26/23
vs. Boston = 12/23
vs. Washington = 17/22
vs. Chicago = 16/24

In total, Gretzky scored 99 goals in 141 games, a pace of 56 goals per 80 games (the same pace as my previous calculation, so no change).

So, 64/80 for Bossy and 56/80 for Gretzky. Advantage Bossy. Does this tell the whole story? Er... sort of, but not really. If we were to tweak the opponents to "top 3" or "top 10" or whatever, the stats could change a bit either way, I'm not sure.

I think the point some of us are trying to make about Gretzky is that he could dominate both as a goal scorer and as a playmaker (or both) as the situation required. (Bossy, by the way, is probably underrated as a passer / playmaker, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm selling him short there, but obviously he's a couple of tiers below Gretzky.)

Take the Montreal series in 1981, which Edmonton surprisingly won. Gretzky dominated game one as a playmaker and pretty single-handedly won that game. Later, Gretzky dominated game three as a goal-scorer with a hat-trick and was a big part of that win.

I get what you are saying about "Tuesday night games vs. Colorado Rockies with Edmonton 20 points in the lead", and it's true. But the Islanders had a lot of meaningless games late in seasons, too, as they were often far ahead of the competition midway through those 1978 to 1984 seasons. And while Gretzky of course put up dominant goal-scoring against Los Angeles and Winnipeg, he also scored a lot against certain "top defensive" teams. Like, just in 1980-81 and 1981-82 alone (those 'Colorado Rockies' years), Gretzky scored 15 goals in 7 games vs. Philadelphia, and 25 goals in 21 games vs. them over seven years, a far higher pace than Bossy against the same team. He also scored 3 in 3 games vs. Montreal in the 1981 series, 4 in 5 games vs. the Islanders in the '84 Finals, 7 in 5 games vs. Philly in the '85 Final, etc. If we could simply prove that Gretzky didn't score goals against stronger teams, your argument for Bossy here would be stronger, but what I see is that Gretzky would sometimes dominate by goal scoring, and sometime by playmaking, and sometimes both, and against both stronger and weaker opponents.

I'm also going to bring up the fact (I realize this is getting more speculative) that Gretzky in Edmonton faced those (most of) top defensive teams only 3 times a year, and often 2 of them were out of his time zone, at the end of rough road trips. Those games against Eastern opponents were also less important to Edmonton in the standings. I just think a larger per-season sample size would be more telling. For example, we see how Gretzky struggled against Boston (more than any other club) in the 80s... but when he faced them in the playoffs, he completely dominated them.

In any case, I'm not necessarily arguing that Gretzky trumps Bossy as a goal-scorer (I am on 'Team Bossy', and increasingly so in recent years -- see my recent post arguing that Bossy in his prime was largely comparable to Ovechkin in his prime, which I got savagely attacked for). And I appreciate the info that clearly shows that Bossy was a major goal-scorer against top defensive clubs during his prime.

 

[Yozhik v tumane]

I’m appreciating the general vibe that we’re removing ourselves from the initial “gtfo you silly eejits”-responses.

 

[Big Phil]

Gretzky was the better goal scorer, no doubt. Their careers overlapped nearly perfectly. Who was the guy who dominated the goal scoring race and yet still put up a record number of assists?

I'll say this, Bossy falls into the category of being perhaps the best pure goal scorer of all-time. At least until Ovechkin came around. But better than Gretzky? No, he's just the purest goal scorer, meaning a player who scored goals better than any other aspect of his game.

 

[authentic]

Because Bossy was a better goal scorer against set defences, he was the better goal scorer in close games and against better teams.

When it comes to winning championships—in the playoffs or best on best international tournaments—goals in close games are more valuable than goals in blowouts, and goals against better teams are more valuable than goals against worse teams, because they are more likely to turn losses into wins.

You could say Gretzky was better at attacking the cracks and taking advantage of weaknesses as a goal scorer. But at the highest level there are fewer weaknesses to exploit. That’s why Gretzky was a playmaker first in the 1987 Canada Cup.

This is also why I believe he wouldn't fair as well as Lemieux in the modern era. I think he was the best in a wide open chaotic system (which makes perfect sense since his greatest gift was anticipating the play) but there's no way I would put my money on him outscoring a peak Lemieux in 1995-current day NHL. To be clear I mean total points as well, not just goals.

 

[ContrarianGoaltender]

I don't know for sure the temperature of the room in 1983-85, because I was in preschool around that time - but contemporary quotes about Bossy seem to call him "the best pure goal scorer". That's a nebulous term that drives a lot of us crazy, but what I believe it most often means is, out of all the players who mainly just score goals, he's the best one at it. I don't believe terms like that necessarily mean to include players who do so much more for their teams, like Gretzky and Lemieux. You often heard the term used to describe Rocket Richard - "Gordie is the better all-around player, but for pure goal-scoring, give me the rocket", or Pavel Bure, or Brett Hull, so I think that's a fair sense of what it means.

I'm sure some people have that perspective, but I'm not convinced that actually matches the real world usage most of the time. Nearly every time someone is explicitly ranking "pure goal scorers", they still put Gretzky and Lemieux somewhere on their lists. For example, here's a link to an HFBoards thread on the top 10 goal scorers of all-time all the way back in December 2006, where the OP says he is listing his "ten best pure goal-scorers ever". Here are how Bossy and Gretzky were placed by the various contributors in that thread (excluding purely stats-based posts that weren't explicitly trying to rank the players overall):

1. Bossy, 9. Gretzky
2. Bossy, 6. Gretzky
5. Gretzky, 8. Bossy
5. Gretzky, 6. Bossy
1. Bossy, 2. Gretzky
6. Gretzky, 7. Bossy

That's a 50-50 split in terms of people ranking Bossy ahead of Gretzky, with nobody just leaving Gretzky or Lemieux off because they didn't count as "pure enough". That seems to suggest that people were using "pure goal scorer" as a qualitative description of a player's skill at scoring goals, rather than deploying it as a weapon to exclude an entire class of player.

Interestingly there's a close analogy here in football, where people often get into arguments about which QB is the best "pure passer". It seems that there is also some controversy in that debate about what that phrase exactly means, with two schools of thought:

1. It has to do with style ("This guy is a pure passer because he can't run or move around, he just stands in the pocket and either throws the ball or takes a sack")

2. It has to do with skill ("Ignore all the other stuff that makes a great QB like being a field general or reading defences or rushing for first downs or durability or leading last-minute scoring drives in big games, this guy is the best pure passer because he can make all the throws and he's the best at getting the ball to the receiver he's aiming at")

I'm sure that sounds familiar. I completely understand the frustration with terms being somewhat undefined or meaning different things to different people in the middle of a debate, and I fully agree that debates involving the style-based logic of definition 1 don't really add much value. However, I don't think that invalidates the usefulness of the idea, because people can and should just stick to definition 2. Focusing just on the skills, you can defend a claim such as, to pick a random example, Aaron Rodgers having a better passing ability than Tom Brady even though Brady is the greater QB overall, in much the same way that you can make the case that Bossy had better goal scoring skills than Gretzky even though Gretzky was clearly the superior player.

I don't. I see you've edited this since then, but just to be clear, I said he was better at enough of them to a large enough degree. It all depends on the degrees, really, it could just take one thing. If he could shoot the puck 130 mph, for example, that might override all other factors. I did include a few things in there that seemed to apply specifically to Gretzky more than anyone else, to help explain what I think made him a better goal scorer. I'm sure you can guess which ones.

That's the thing about Gretzky, certain things he did were simply off the charts. Anyone who has pondered making an all-time hockey video game or just rating all-time players in a number of key skill categories has probably noticed the same thing - that in order to make it so that Gretzky is one of the three best overall players in the game/thought experiment, some of his skills need to break the scale. If you give him a 7/10 in speed, a 6 in shot power, a 2 in physicality, a 4 in defense, there's just no way for him to make up ground on dozens of other players who either excel at everything or have no major weakness. How would he ever pull ahead of Bourque, Harvey, Howe, Orr, even Lemieux, who's basically a 10 in every offensive attribute? the answer is he has to be, like, a 15 in passing, in hockey sense, in offensive awareness or whatever it is you want to call it. He was not better than everyone at everything, but being so much better than everyone else at just a couple of things is what made him (probably) the best ever. And that's kind of how it is with his goal scoring too. It's all the mental parts of it, because it's not really his physical attributes that drive it, like most other great scorers.

OK, we're definitely on the same page here about the characteristics of Gretzky as a player, other than how much they should apply under the category of "goal scoring" specifically. I really like your video game analogy and I think it might be worthwhile to keep using this frame of reference, so here are the EA Sports NHL 22 ratings for Alex Ovechkin (our stand-in as the pure goal scorer) and Connor McDavid (our stand-in as the generational offensive talent), and I'll delete things like Fighting Skill, Faceoffs and Shot Blocking so we can narrow in on the more relevant offensive attributes:

Attribute	Ovechkin	McDavid
Acceleration	88	96
Agility	87	96
Balance	95	89
Handeye	95	97
Deking	88	97
Durability	85	85
Endurance	88	89
Offensive Awareness	96	98
Passing	88	96
Poise	95	95
Puck Control	91	97
Slapshot Accuracy	95	94
Slapshot Power	96	90
Speed	88	96
Wristshot Accuracy	94	96
Wristshot Power	95	90

[TBODY] [/TBODY]

Let's say you had the task of coming up with "Overall Goal Scoring" and "Overall Playmaking" ratings. Can you design one that both makes sense with your philosophy of goal scoring being the macro-level result of a variety of offensive skills, while still also ranking Ovechkin ahead of McDavid as a goal scorer?

From your earlier post, and from what a lot of people seem to be suggesting in here (people who have more accomplishments-focused or "macro value" perspectives on goal scoring), I think there would be a temptation to include a lot of categories under goal scoring, from skating skills like Acceleration, Agility and Speed, to things like Handeye, Puck Control, and Deking, to Offensive Awareness and of course the various shooting skills. But here's the problem: McDavid is ahead in every single one of those categories other than the shooting ones. Add anything more than a few of those other categories, and your rating will start to tell you that McDavid is the better goal scorer, which obviously makes no sense either subjectively or objectively.

Let's also think about playmaking as a close analogy. Do we need to add all those different skills there? Probably not, I'd say we're likely fine with Offensive Awareness, Passing and Puck Control, and that's it. Very nice and simple, which again makes it seem a bit peculiar in contrast to throw the entire house in there under goal scoring.

I don't know, it seems like people love to try to refute the idea of subjectively defining goal scoring by saying things like, "Aren't you just judging how good somebody is at shooting then? There are tons of other things that go into goal scoring," before immediately going off and talking about how good somebody is at playmaking, and my response to that is, "Well, why is that actually incorrect? We are talking about scoring goals here, right?" I'm not sure goal scoring is really so complicated that we can't isolate all the underlying variables. You need to either find open areas in the offensive zone or occupy a dangerous scoring location, you need to get the puck (if you don't have it already), and then you need to shoot it past the goalie. Certainly far from easy, but definitely not impossibly complex.

Of course I would also factor in skills like the crucial ability to find space in the offensive zone, or the very useful skill of causing havoc and banging in pucks around the crease, but if Ovechkin does very little better than McDavid offensively other than shoot the puck and yet he's still clearly the better goal scorer, well, it seems to me that at the very least shooting should make up a pretty substantial portion of anybody's "Goal Scoring Rating". And start going down that road of thinking about the relevant skills, and sooner or later you just might end up with something approaching a defensible concept of a "pure goal scorer".

(Note: A very reasonable response to this is to say that EA Sports ratings are terrible. I'm certainly not basing my entire Bossy over Gretzky argument on the fact that for some reason they think that Ovechkin and McDavid are somehow very close in terms of slap shot accuracy. I do think my logic holds regardless of the exact specifics here though.)

I don't think there is much of a need to micromanage comparisons like this. I'm not concerned with cases where a player had 10-20% more goals or assists than another tipping the scales in a goalscoring or playmaking comparison. This only comes up with Gretzky because of his magnitude. There are very few players who were off the charts - Gretzky and Lemieux are obvious ones, Howe is right there too (I disagree Richard was a better goal scorer; similar to this discussion I think Howe was not only better at pure goalscoring, but also could have been even better because he also was the game's best playmaker while exceeding Richard's goalscoring exploits).

They're off the charts as offensive players, absolutely. The entire point of debate is whether they are off the charts as goal scorers. Maybe you can make the case that they are, but I think evaluating goal scoring and playmaking as separate categories really only makes sense if we're drawing a bright red line down the middle between them somewhere (and yes, I think even for something like Gretzky's one-in-a-million hockey IQ you have to either split it or pick a side). Otherwise, aren't we just blatantly double counting? That really does feel like something that @overpass mentioned upthread, that we're not actually identifying goal scoring or playmaking at all but merely who is the better offensive player, at least when it comes to generational offensive talents who create so many scoring chances that they are going to be all over the stats charts in virtually all categories.

 

[authentic]

Fair point. Gretzky may still be ahead of Bossy for the early 1980s regular season, even when looking only at goals when the game is close against good teams.

I think Bossy moves ahead based on his playoff and international goal scoring, especially against top teams and not counting blowouts.

In the world of professional basketball, anyone who compares and rank the top players puts a lot of weight on playoff performance. The NBA has a long regular season, and most players don’t go all out for 82 games. Opposing defences don’t play as hard and don’t game plan against you like they do in the playoffs. Everyone knows Lebron has paced himself in the regular season since 2014 or so before going hard in the playoffs. Kawhi in 2019 was another great example...very good in the regular season, but absolutely incredible in the playoffs when his ability to score against locked in playoff defences became invaluable. If you’re looking at regular season performance only, you might think James Harden was in Michael Jordan territory as a scorer, but when you look at the postseason it’s clear he wasn’t.

I think the NHL in the first half of the 1980s was similar to the NBA. 16 of 21 teams made the playoffs, and it was a long regular season. Players and teams played themselves into shape over the course of the season. Wayne Gretzky was a bit of an exception because he had exceptional conditioning and endurance, and he just seemed to be wired to go all out to score for 60 minutes of every game. I don’t think he had selfish motives, I think it’s just who he was, but the result was that he wasn’t quite as far above the rest of the league as his regular season scoring would suggest. When you look at playoff scoring and you look at timely scoring in the playoffs, you realize Mike Bossy and Mark Messier weren’t so far behind Gretzky…and in fact Bossy was ahead when you look only at goal scoring.

I was just curious if you've done a similar analysis on Lemieux's career and if so what the results were?

 

[authentic]

Gretzky's goal-scoring ability declined very substantially during his career.

After his 23-year-old season ('84-'85), he was top-5 in goals-per-game only once. So, when Gretzky was younger than McDavid and Matthews are right now, he was pretty much finished as an elite goal-scorer.

His goal-scoring declined mostly because his skating and agility declined. (And the increasingly tougher defense being played in the late '80s and through the '90s was probably a more minor factor). He was not able to score goals as easily.

His goal-scoring depended a lot on his skating, much more than Bossy's did. Bossy was much more of a natural goal-scorer than Gretzky was.

I actually believe it was more the other way around, which would make sense considering the analysis done by overpass and also watching Gretzky skate like he hadn't lost a step in the mid 90s. His speed was as good as ever and also his strength on the puck, but yes his agility was never recovered after 1991.

 

[authentic]

I mean - he already scored more goals than anyone else didn't he? He doesn't need any argument at all - for anything?

People in this thread are the ones making weird arguments such as "goals vs set defense" and the likes. Gretzky scored more goals than anyone in playoffs or regular season. Head to head vs Bossy he outscored him by a lot, repeatedly. We don't even need to mention the existence of assists to make a case for Gretzky above Bossy.

If you want to start introducing things like "set defense" and the likes - it's only fair to also consider that Gretzky's main focus was usually his playmaking. Pretty astounding that he still scored more goals than anyone else

The arguments are laid out pretty clearly in the OP and they're not weird at all.

 

[overpass]

There are two ways to interpret this: 1. Gretzky couldn't handle the best opponents, or 2. Bossy didn't try as hard to score against the worst teams. Considering Gretzky is the greatest playoff performer of all time, I think the second option is very clearly the more accurate description. Gretzky had an unstoppable motor and the Oilers played pond hockey during the regular season, while the Islanders rolled their lines while playing within a defined system in the more defensive Conference. In my opinion, some of Bossy's seemingly "best" seasons are merely the seasons where he scored more meaningless goals against the worst teams (1981-82, for example).

It’s interesting that you mention 1981-82 as a season where Bossy scored more meaningless goals against the worst teams. I wasn’t aware of the splits, but I was going to say that if there was one season where Bossy was motivated by stats more than the others, it was that one. That’s the season where he scored 50 in 50, and he was definitely trying to reach that statistical milestone.

I don’t know if this is the case but it’s possible Al Arbour may have been on board with Bossy going for 50 in 50 as well and given him more opportunities.

Thinking of Arbour, I wanted to say that when we’re talking about Bossy and Gretzky’s scoring in different situations, the biggest factor may have been their respective coaches, the expectations they had of Bossy/Gretzky in different game situations, amd the opportunities they gave them to score. We’re really looking at Bossy/Arbour and Gretzky/Sather when we look at the raw stats.

 

[The Panther]

It’s interesting that you mention 1981-82 as a season where Bossy scored more meaningless goals against the worst teams. I wasn’t aware of the splits, but I was going to say that if there was one season where Bossy was motivated by stats more than the others, it was that one. That’s the season where he scored 50 in 50

No, that was in 1980-81.

 

[Sentinel]

The only way Bossy comes out on top here is if you define "pure goal scorer" as "a player who can score goals but is incapable of anything else."

But then it would be slightly unfair to Bossy because "Bossy-to-Trottier" passing play is 5th combo of all time.

 

[overpass]

No, that was in 1980-81.

Oh yeah, 81-82 was Gretzky going for it.

 

[LeBlondeDemon10]

The only way Bossy comes out on top here is if you define "pure goal scorer" as "a player who can score goals but is incapable of anything else."

But then it would be slightly unfair to Bossy because "Bossy-to-Trottier" passing play is 5th combo of all time.

Where do you find the other best combos?

 

[Sentinel]

Where do you find the other best combos?

I don't remember where I saw it. "Gretzky-to-Kurri" was #1, "Trottier-to-Bossy" was #2, and "Orr-to-Esposito" was #3 IIRC.

 

[Staniowski]

All of these stat posts but no one posted any goal highlights so we can visually see how both players scored their goals.

Bossy scored goals in a wide variety of ways, maybe only Lemieux can compare among great goal-scorers (a few others, including Howe, could also score in many different ways).

Bossy had a great slapshot, snapshot, and wristshot. His shots were generally hard, and accurate, and released very quickly (which he was famous for).

He used his slapshot skating down the wing.

He was also famous for his excellent positioning in the slot, for getting open....and for using his quick release from there.

Great on 2 on 1 rushes, and other rushes.

Also great on breakaways....dekes and wristshots, which he got off quickly and which were difficult to read for the goalie.

Good backhand too.

 

[Staniowski]

It seems to me that quite a few posters on this site are convinced Bossy was a much better goal scorer than his goal totals suggest because of things such as how natural goal scoring seemed to come to him, how deadly his shot was, how prolific he was at scoring in certain situations etc.

Theoretically, I might be able to buy a convincing argument that he was the most clutch goal scorer ever or more clutch than a certain player or that he was the best at scoring goals against tough defenses or better at scoring goals against tough defenses than another player, but to me actual goal outputs are very significant when it comes to evaluating goal scoring ability. Because Bossy was never able to score 70 goals in an era when other players were able to do so, I find it very difficult to call him the best or greatest goal scorer ever. Yes, he played on good defensive teams, but those teams were also capable of scoring a lot of goals and he had plenty of talent to work with (including Trottier and Potvin).

I feel the apologists for Bossy may be better served using qualifiers than speaking in absolutes. Is he the greatest goal scorer or a better goal scorer than Gretzky under X and/or Y conditions? Maybe. Is he the greatest goal scorer ever? I don't buy it... or buy the argument he was a better goal scorer than Wayne (whom I personally don't consider the best or greatest goal scorer ever) necessarily. If Dennis Maruk is able to hit 60 goals in that era, the greatest goal scorer of all-time should be able to put up more than 70 at some point playing with Trottier.

It's kind of like how Mike Gartner had great tools for goal scoring and was a natural at it and was able to score at a fairly good to good rate year after year but was never able to top 50 goals. He had all those tools and yet something was missing that kept him from reaching that next level. Obviously Mike Bossy was a better player and goal scorer than Gartner, but his goal scoring peak is also fairly underwhelming when comparing him to the all-time greats in that facet of the game.

The comparison, here, is just between Bossy and Gretzky. Neither of them are the best goal-scorer ever.