For those who like knowing how much each player contributed to their team’s offensive production and where each team ranked in goals for the season:
Sakic:
118 points on 270 Colorado goals (4th most in the league) 43.7%
Thornton:
33 points on 81 Boston goals (3.12 GPG with him on team, 2.66 GPG without him)
92 points on 203 San Jose goals (2.58 GPG without him on team, 3.50 GPG with him)
125 points total on 284 goals (1 shootout goal subtracted, the combined total would be 4th most in the league) 44.0%
McDavid:
132 points on 292 Edmonton goals (2 shootout goals subtracted, 4th most in the league) 45.2%
Close no matter how one slices it. Factoring in the context of McDavid playing injured all season and missing 6 games, and still doing what he did probably makes him the most impressive, but I’m sticking with Thornton because he won the hardware and had such an extreme effect on his team’s production.
I'd say it's similar to McDavid. The moment McDavid really turned it on is when the Oilers turnaround started, on Nov 24th.
They were 5-12-1 before that game and McDavid had 16pts in 16 games. He then had 116pts in the next 60 games, never looking back and the team's record skyrocketed, going 43-13-4 in those 60 games. Going purely on total GF in that sequence, they scored 232 goals and McDavid was in on 50% of that.
What I find most impressive though is that being the most disadvantaged by league output (vs adjusted stats), he had the most EV points of all three players, 87 vs 72 for Thornton vs 66 for Sakic. Even better, he had more EV pts than either of them in those 60 games (79) where the Oilers were ressurected.
He also accomplished something rarely talked about, but still very significant:
Only two players have ever had 50 primary assists in 50 games or less in a season. Gretzky did it 9 times and Lemieux did it twice. McDavid became the 3rd player to do it last season, from nov 24th till march 21st (iirc), he had 51 A1 in 49 games. Two players came close. Elmer Lach in Mo Richard's 50/50 season in 44-45, who had 47 in 50, and Pat Lafontaine in 92-93, whose best sequence was 44 in 50.
Not relevant to this thread, but McDavid continued that torrid pace, finishing his last 60 games with 58x A1s, and adding 24 more in 25 games in the playoffs, becoming the 2nd player to get 20 or more A1s in the playoffs (all other players are at 18 or lower). Gretzky still holds the record at 25.
At the moment, he has 82 primary assists in his last 85 games played and that's the most anyone not named Gretzky has ever had in a similar sequence.