Like I said, if you want Kessel he's yours. Its a bad habit of his to look like the Richard winner in October and then not even finish with 40 goals. We Leaf fans are actually sick of it by now and we've seen enough of him to judge. Had his goals been spread out a bit more and he came through in tight games the Leafs are in better shape other than a logjam in October don't you think? But we're off topic.
Yes we are. But let me just point out, in case you didn't see it when QPQ posted it, Turgeon was significantly better post-all-star break, when you think the games get significantly more important, so he's not comparable to Kessel. Yeah, I brought Kessel up for different reasons but you seem to think they are similar in that they will score meaningless points and aren't "crunch time" players when the opposite seems to be true for Turgeon when you actually look at the numbers.
You ignored their eerily similar top 20 finishes? Why is that? It is about as fool proof of a stat out there.
No, apparently it is not "fool proof" because you believe that top-20 finishes are perfectly comparable from the 1980s to the 1990s, when the Europeans made the talent pool deeper, and the 5th-15th best scorers were closer to the leaders than ever before.
Besides, 4, 6, 12, 13, 13, 15, 20 is only "eerily similar" to 5, 7, 13, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 if you ignore that:
a) Gretzky is responsible for the 4 and 6, they are likely not top-10 seasons otherwise
b) That is 8 high level seasons for Turgeon, 7 for Nicholls
c) Nicholls' next best two seasons are 35th and 37th; Turgeon's are 22nd and 24th, before you scoff, realize that those were just 1 and 3 points away from top-20 seasons
d) on top of all that, Turgeon had
three more seasons just 7-8 points out of 20th, Nicholls was never that close
e) Turgeon could have cruised to three more top-5 seasons if not for injury; Nicholls was never close to that kind of production in his injury-shortened years (but oh wait, wasn't he supposed to be, since he had fewer GP?
)
Or the fact that Nicholls has the better PPG? Or that each of them has about the same about of elite seasons/good seasons under their belt. I will even admit that Turgeon's PPG should suffer for playing more hockey in the dead puck era. But their finishes compared to their peers don't change.
so if you realize the eras were different, why bring up raw PPG? Based on adjusted PPG, Turgeon holds a large edge; 1.02 to .95, maintained over 170 more games, no less. Of course since adjusted stats take some of the shine off your precious 1980s players you will swear up and down that they are wrong, despite the fact that they are based on the undeniable fact that when scoring goes down, so does the number of goals needed to win a hockey game, and winning hockey games is what matters. But ok. You keep your blinders on if it helps you sleep at night.
This whole thing is just funny now. Your lack of understanding of the big picture and obvious bias in favour of 80s players makes any reasonable player comparison futile. Going forward I will let that be your problem and not mine.
Turgeon did have more offensive talent. He had a better skill set, better vision, etc. I agree with that. But if that is where you draw the line on who was better offensively I'm afraid you have to look at both sides. Who had better offensive talent AND who produced better on the ice go hand in hand in deciding who was better offensively. I don't see how you fail to see how Nicholls didn't produce practically the same as Turgeon.
No matter what grade school crap you try and throw at me, This:
93 80 80 79 79 77 74 73 72 71
is not close to this:
110 103 100 93 89 86 85 83 83 80
And the above is based on crediting Turgeon for just 65 missed games and Nicholls for 96.
the "percentage" method may or may not be a more sophisticated portrayal of offense than hockey-reference's adjusted points, but it's at least something that levels the playing field, and really, anything that does, tells us the same thing:
Top percentage scores:
Savard: 108 100 95 86 86 83 79 75 65 63
Turgeon: 93 89 86 85 84 83 83 80 75 70
Nicholls: 93 80 80 79 77 73 72 64 63 52
Top percentage scores with injury credits applied:
Savard: 108 100 100 95 86 86 84 83 79 65 (includes 42 games of injury credits)
Turgeon: 110 103 100 93 89 86 85 83 83 80 (includes 67 games of injury credits)
Nicholls: 93 80 80 79 79 77 74 73 72 71 (includes 96 games of injury credits)
Best seasons by hockey-reference adjusted points, no injury credit:
Savard: 110 98 91 87 83 76 74 68 67 62
Turgeon: 106 92 89 89 88 86 84 80 78 74
Nicholls: 124 94 88 80 76 75 69 65 65 59
Best seasons by overpass' adjusted points, no injury credit:
Savard: 117 110 106 106 101 87 86 77 71 71
Turgeon: 123 104 102 101 101 100 99 98 92 89 (89 89)
Nicholls: 139 97 97 87 85 84 74 73 72 69
best seasons by offensive GVT by Alan Ryder (very respected in the stats community), no injury credit
Savard: 20.4, 17.4, 17.1, 14.9, 13.6, 12.9, 12.2, 10.6, 10.5, 9.1
Turgeon: 20.8, 17.1, 16.1, 15.7, 15.7, 15.7, 14.4, 14.4, 14.3, 14.2
Nicholls: 27.2, 15.3, 14.6, 12.3, 11.1, 10.0, 9.8, 9.6, 8.4, 6.8
Every intellectual method of looking at a player's offensive dominance tells us the same thing: Savard and Turgeon are very similar, and Nicholls is not in their league. The only thing that doesn't, is raw stats without context. You continue to look like a dinosaur here. Time to develop with the rest of us.
As for Savard, the eye test favours him and the offensive dominance does too. Its win-win for Savard. Nobody would take Turgeon on their team over Savard for a reason.
Points from 1980-'90
Gretzky - 1842
Stastny - 1059
Kurri - 1043
Savard - 1013
Turgeon is 8th in points from the time he entered the NHL over a decade. Only Oates is ahead of him who isn't a HHOFer.
You did 11 seasons, not 10, and you picked his best 11 seasons. Picking ten seasons from the start of Turgeon's career means you're including one of his worst seasons (as an 18 year old) and using one fewer season than you did for Savard. An apples-to-apples comparison puts Turgeon 7th in his best 10 years, with one of those players being Lemieux, so it's more like a 6th if we're being fair (Lemieux in the right time frame would have been ahead of Savard too).
The presence or absence of one player or another doesn't make a different player better or worse. They're still the same player either way. You're falling into the rankings trap again and I've tried to throw you a lifeline but you insist on sinking. Be my guest.
So what's more impressive? Having 96% as many points as a borderline top-100 player like Stastny? Or having 89% as many as Yzerman? Sounds pretty damn close to even to me. I never said Turgeon was definitively his peer, but there are many ways to look at the numbers fairly between the eras (none of which you are interested in employing) and they all seem to reach the same conclusion that they are within 5% of eachother.
Or, to put it another way, since we're talking about massive sample sizes, the handful of games missed by each player here is irrelevant. what's more impressive? 1.38 PPG when scoring is 3.804 goals per game? or 1.19 PPG when scoring is 3.231 goals per game? Seems scoring was 18% higher but Savard scored 16% more. Cue the "I'm old school and only believe in raw stats" mantra.....
Not bad, but then again when you add in Savard's playoff advantage there is even more seperation.
What playoff advantage? the same adjusted PPG level maintained over more games because 80% of the teams made the playoffs, because he played in the Norris division, and because his goalies didn't suck?
Nicholls is 10th in points the first 10 years he was in the NHL. Everyone above him is a HHOFer and the 5 below him are as well (not saying Nicholls is a HHOFer). Based on that Turgeon is closer to Nicholls than Savard.
let's keep it apples to apples please. Nicholls' most favourable period is '84-94. He was 8th in points, 84% of Steve Yzerman. His PPG was the same as Turgeon's in his most favourable period, but scoring was 14% higher in his timeframe. 14% is not close.
If Turgeon was closer to Savard he'd be in the HHOF by now. Nicholls doesn't belong but he is near the top of the ones who aren't in there. Savard is a shoo-in. You'd think Turgeon would be in there already if people viewed him more like Savard than Nicholls, no?
Gaudy 1980s career and single season totals have been a benefit to HHOF induction for a number of players and lower 1990s career and single season totals have been a detriment to others. Everyone can see this by now. Relative to era, Turgeon's
point production was just as strong as Savard's. If people don't see him as a HHOFer because he had "no heart" and didn't make a mockery of junior hockey in a 1987 brawl. I don't really care. I've never been a fan myself. I know he lacked "intangibles". But somehow this has leaked into people's perceptions of his offensive output and this has been shown on numerous occasions, from a variety of angles, that that is a joke. I can only wonder if he hadn't missed those 67 games in those three seasons, what people would say then.
Turgeon's 2000 season, he was basically tied with Bure for 3rd in PPG. Jagr, Sakic and Bure each scored more points AND had a higher PPG, so it does seem a bit far-fetched to call Turgeon anything more than the fourth best scorer that season.
I don't like partial seasons being equated to full seasons, unless the player played at or above that level in previous years or in those immediate following. Turgeon had a substantially higher raw PPG in '93, although a slightly lower adjusted PPG that year. He had three season (total of 212 games) each of which were less than 10% under his 2000 pace, so he might have been expected to come close to that level at season's end. OTOH, two of those seasons were 6 and 7 years previous, while in the other he only played 60 games, so it may have been expecting a lot.
He did play 52 games at that level, about 60% of the season, which is enough to establish that he would have had a fine season, but not quite enough to have confidence that he would have kept up that pace (would prefer ~75% of season completed to say that's very likely).
On Turgeon's side is the fact that he left a game early due to injury, then missed two months and had three consecutive scoreless games upon his return. He had 58 points in his last 42 games, went scoreless, then was injured in the next game. Malkin had 58 points in his best 41 game stretch this season, so it's not such a stretch to suggest that Turgeon was having an elite year before he got injured.
The Turgeon/Oates comparison is interesting, given that they are near the top of many scoring lists of eligible players not in the HHOF.
There's nothing wrong with saying "if everything else happened the way it did, and Turgeon didn't get injured, then this would have happened..." - and I do the same thing for other players he's compared to, as well. I realize if there are spikes you can regress to the mean to make numbers look more "realistic" but as a stats guy you can still see that 1994, 1998 and 2000 are still top-5 seasons for the guy even if you apply some sort of regression to his 15, 22, and 30 games played. It's debatable whether something like that even needs to be done, considering that:
- 69 games is definitely enough to make an assumption about the next 15, even if 60/22 is a small reach and 52/30 is even more of a reach
- Turgeon was a player who scored more and more as the season went on
- Looking at the seasons when he was injured, he produced at comparable rates both before and after the injuries; the most reasonable assumption is that it would have continued during that time as well
Anyway, I did a small project sort of like this in the ATD where I showed that Pat LaFontaine was better than his meagre list of top-20 finishes looks because that elementary method misses a lot of games he played at the level of a top-15 scorer. In seasons where he didn't play many games, I "regressed" his totals in a rather simple fashion to avoid over-crediting him. It ends up being a major "what if" because it's based on a couple hundred missed games, of course, but it does show how long he played at a certain level. I have never done that for Turgeon but if I did, what would you suggest? Imagine a 5% PPG drop in the missing games? 10%? 15%? or a sliding percentage based on the uncertainty surrounding larger numbers of games?
if we say it's 5% in 1994, 10% in 1998 and 15% in 2000, those are still seasons of 113, 90, and 98 points, good for 3rd, 3rd and 1st if all else remains the same. How much more should he be punished for playing those 181 games of elite offensive hockey?
in case you're interested in the work I did on Lafontaine's body of work, here it is:
On the surface, if you just look at the points finishes, he doesn’t get punished enough. His array of top points finishes is without a doubt worse than Pierre Turgeon’s, and The Tin Man gets taken about 200 picks later usually.
Turgeon: 5th, 7th, 13th, 13th, 14th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 22nd, 24th
Lafontaine: 2nd, 8th, 15th, 16th, 18th, 22nd, 22nd, 36th
But there were so many injury-riddled years in there that it makes that line look less impressive than it is. If we try to extrapolate what he was doing in these years out to a full year (while being fair and realistic) then we can get a better idea of what kind of offense threat he was on the ice. And yes, we’ve all seen him, but I mean in terms of comparing those per-game numbers more fairly to his contemporaries.
I’ve done this for Turgeon before and if you credit him with just 82 games that he missed in 1994, 1998, 1999 and 2000 then his row of finishes looks like this:
Turgeon: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 13th, 13th, 14th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 22nd
This establishes two standards for comparison that I will have to do for Lafontaine:
- If you play at least half a season it is ok to extrapolate those results to a full season without curving down
- Seasons with 69 GP are considered “injury-riddled†and can be adjusted
- Seasons with 77+ GP are not and can not be adjusted
- Turgeon didn’t have any relevant seasons with 70-76GP, so I never defined an exact standard there. Let’s be nice to Lafontaine and say that 76 or under is adjustable, as this allows us to adjust four more seasons for him.
So, let’s start. First of all, Lafontaine was not making a dent in any leaderboards until 1988. In 1987 at age 21, he was “just†a 70-point player. Yes, in 1984 he scored at a 101-point pace but that was for 15 games and his 1985 results show that was just a hot streak.
These are the seasons where simple adjustments need to be made to properly appreciate the per-game level Lafontaine was playing at and not be a slave to his actual points ranking:
- 1988: 92 points in 75 games, was 16th, would be 13th
- 1990: 105 points in 74 games, was 8th, would be 6th
- 1991: 85 points in 75 games, was 22nd, would be 15th
- 1992: 93 points in 57 games, was 15th, would be 1st
- 1996: 91 points in 76 games, was 22nd, would be 8th
- 1998: 62 points in 67 games, was 36th, would be 22nd
These are the seasons where more difficult adjustments need to be made, as it’s too much of a leap to conclude he would have maintained these levels of production all year:
- 1994: 18 points in 16 games
- 1995: 27 points in 22 games
- 1997: 8 points in 13 games
In the cases of 1994 and 1995, their results should be compared to the adjacent seasons and adjusted downwards slightly (regressed to the mean, so to speak) to be realistic.
- In the case of 1994, it’s reasonable to suggest he’d maintain that same 1.13 PPG average with no downward adjustment, considering what he did in 1993 (which was not sustainable for any star player) and the per-game rate he produced at in 1995.
- In the case of 1995, the 1.23 rate he produced at is just a bit higher than the 1.18 he averaged in the 1994, 1995 and 1996 seasons combined. The 22 games he played are done, and it’s realistic to expect that in the other 26 he scores 1.18 adjusted down by 10%.
- In the case of 1997, he likely would have exceeded this rate of production and not just scored 50 points. Average out 1996, 1997 and 1998, (1.03 PPG) and adjust down 10% for the remaining 69 games.
That gives us:
- 1994: 95 points, would be 14th
- 1995: 55 points, would be 9th
- 1997: 72 points, would be 31st
That would give Lafontaine a string of 11 straight seasons in the top-31 in scoring:
1st, 2nd, 6th, 8th, 9th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 18th, 22nd, 31st
Just like Turgeon’s “actual†string of 13 seasons in the top-35 and “would be†string of 13 seasons in the top-27:
1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 13th, 13th, 14th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 22nd, 27th
*In both of their 1sts place supposed finishes, had generational talents not also missed games, they would not have had a scoring title.
In both Lafontaine and Turgeon’s cases, it’s fair to say they had/have the ability to produce at a Denis Savard level (Savard’s line of supposed finishes is 3rd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 6th, 7th, 7th, 7th, 13th, 30th, before Europeans made a major impact on the leaderboard) when they are in the lineup. (and, I should add, since I’m apparently in a year-long Turgeon crusade, that after all these adjustments he still looks like the more “solid bet†in the ATD than Pat) But, Lafontaine missed 26% of his team’s games in his 11 relevant seasons, Turgeon missed 9% in his 13 relevant seasons, & Savard only missed 8% in his 10 relevant seasons.
So, whatever level of production you can count on these guys for in identical situations (as good offensive 2nd line centers who also get PP time, I’d say about 0.8 PPG in this very competitive league) you might get for 61 games from Lafontaine, and about 75 from Turgeon and Savard.
Conclusion: Basically the point of all this is, Lafontaine’s “raw†finishes really underrate him and if you look at what kind of player he was on a per-game basis you can see he was quite dominant offensively in a way that you can’t using raw finishes. But it is a double-edged sword because to do that you have to also concede that there will be missed games along the way.
I hope this has been interesting, it was for me.
