Prime Lindros was always pacing like he would have scored 100pts if he played 75 games in a high scoring enviromment, he certainly had a 100 pts offense.
1.33 ppg are 100 pts player (does not need to have a prefect 80-81-82 game season to do it), Lindros pre scoring going down, was comfortably above that:
2002 rangers Lindros scored like Jason Allison, he had nice stretch for sure with Fleury:
So did Mike York,Kapanen and Conroy.
Parrish and Samsonov did the same, we give credit to Lindros here for being more than a Top 30-40 offensive best player in the league in a hot steak but are we right ?
Could just be that the most time I actually saw him play live that year, not in sport 30 clips was in the Olympics that year, I remember being happy for him when he scored that nothing goal (late third in the 7-1 belarus game), it was a painful tourney for him, at time looking like one of the worst Canadian forward.
so in the 2002 season, lindros (and linemates york and fleury) were tied for 2nd behind iginla on dec 28. so were shanahan, zhamnov, and sami kapanen on the hot streak of his life.
that game, lindros got caught by mark smith in a big open ice hit. here is larry brooks: “The Rangers did not immediately use the term, ‘concussion,’ to describe the status of their most important player, and after the game, neither did Lindros.” more about that game and the aftermath
here.
lindros missed the next four games, then went scoreless in his first six games back.
then he scored 18 goals, 34 pts in his remaining 29 games. it was better than his pre-concussion/not concussion pace, but for whatever reason the second half was higher scoring than the first half, so he was only 11th in scoring over that span (jan 22 to the end of the year) and 7th in pts/game. he was behind the absolute best stretches of bertuzzi and naslund’s careers, iginla’s peak season, and (marginally) jagr, kovalev, and jason allison. slightly above bure and sakic.
but the other context is lindros in that post jan 22 stretch kept chugging along at basically a pt/game (which was good for 2nd in the first half but in the 15-20 range in the second half) until he got bure and they went nuts for the last ten games, raising lindros’ pts/game average.
all to say, i think it’s fair to say there was both an immediate impact after the smith hit and a medium term one, where he fell from a too five to a bottom half of the top ten scorer, a which then continued into a longterm freefall in the ensuing years as he started to actively avoid contact (and rightly so).
