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Secondary Assists / Point-streaks

The Panther

The Panther

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Mar 25, 2014
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As we all know, Wayne Gretzky has the longest (from start-of-season) point streak, with 51 games in 1983-84.

Patrick Kane currently has a nice streak going, up to 26 games... which is quite impressive in today's era, since before Gretzky the record was Guy Lafleur's 28.

Anyway, I was wondering about secondary assists. The NHL, compared to international hockey, seems to award them quite generously. I'm curious as to how many of Gretzky's and other players' assists are primary or secondary. Has anyone taken the time to actually break down how many of Gretzky's 1983-84 points were from goals, primary assists, and secondary assists? Likewise, other players (Lemieux, Sundin, Lafleur) who've had long streaks?
 
The Panther said:
As we all know, Wayne Gretzky has the longest (from start-of-season) point streak, with 51 games in 1983-84.

Patrick Kane currently has a nice streak going, up to 26 games... which is quite impressive in today's era, since before Gretzky the record was Guy Lafleur's 28.

Anyway, I was wondering about secondary assists. The NHL, compared to international hockey, seems to award them quite generously. I'm curious as to how many of Gretzky's and other

players' assists are primary or secondary. Has anyone taken the time to actually break down how many of Gretzky's 1983-84 points were from goals, primary assists, and secondary assists? Likewise, other players (Lemieux, Sundin, Lafleur) who've had long streaks?
Click to expand...

I haven't looked it up to be honest.

Although the old joke in Calgary (in the heyday of the Battle of Alberta) was that every time Gretzky was on the ice he got an assist :laugh:
 
The Panther said:
As we all know, Wayne Gretzky has the longest (from start-of-season) point streak, with 51 games in 1983-84.

Patrick Kane currently has a nice streak going, up to 26 games... which is quite impressive in today's era, since before Gretzky the record was Guy Lafleur's 28.

Anyway, I was wondering about secondary assists. The NHL, compared to international hockey, seems to award them quite generously. I'm curious as to how many of Gretzky's and other players' assists are primary or secondary. Has anyone taken the time to actually break down how many of Gretzky's 1983-84 points were from goals, primary assists, and secondary assists? Likewise, other players (Lemieux, Sundin, Lafleur) who've had long streaks?
Click to expand...

I highly doubt those records exist.. An assist is an assist, I'm sure today they may keep primary or secondary assist records but I'm sure they didn't in the 80's... I mean tracking TOI is a fairly new concept, and think about how useful that stat is..

I'm as curious as you are tho, one could only speculate and that would be difficult considering how much the Oilers moved the puck...
 
Hawksfan2828 said:
I highly doubt those records exist.. An assist is an assist, I'm sure today they may keep primary or secondary assist records but I'm sure they didn't in the 80's...
Click to expand...
Well, the box-scores exist, obviously. But I wonder, are they trustworthy? Normally, the 'assisting-player' whose name comes first in the scoring summary got the primary assist, right? But are those box-scores accurate?

I actually think I saw someone's breakdown of something like this on here once, but it may have been a very old thread that I saw by chance....
 
The hockey summary project should have all this data, and their box score are 95%+ accurate. But you'd have to compile the data yourself.

Or you could hope either overpass or matnor sees this thread; one of them might be able to run a query pretty quickly.
 
What I think I remember seeing on here one time is that someone did a breakdown of Gretzky's 163 assist season in 1985-86, and the result was that (not surprisingly) a disproportionate number of his assists were primary ones...

I thought it would be interesting to do such a breakdown of players' point-scoring streaks, but the math may be beyond anyone's patience...
 
On this note, I think I would prefer it if the NHL either dispensed with the secondary assist entirely, or else used the Euro-system of sort-of interpreting whether a third player deserves a point on the play or not. To put it another way, I would rather the secondary assist be used sparingly rather than being the standard.
 
Actually, I have one of overpass's spreadsheets that has seasonal splits for players.

So I can't tell you about the 51 game streak. But I can tell you that in 1983-84 as a whole, Gretzky had 87 goals, 91 primary assists, and only 28 secondary assists.

That was actually a pretty normal split for Gretzky, who had 29, 30, 28, then 34 secondary assists in the 4 years between 81-82 and 84-85. Not a normal split for anyone else to have such a small percentage of their assists as secondary.

year|G|A1|A2
79-80|51|60|26
80-81|55|69|40
81-82|92|91|29
82-83|71|95|30
83-84 | 87 | 91 | 28
84-85|73|101|34
85-86|55|109|53
86-87|62|92|29
 
TheDevilMadeMe said:
.That was actually a pretty normal split for Gretzky, who had 29, 30, 28, then 34 secondary assists in the 4 years between 81-82 and 84-85. Not a normal split for anyone else to have such a small percentage of their assists as secondary.

year|G|A1|A2
79-80|51|60|26
80-81|55|69|40
81-82|92|91|29
82-83|71|95|30
83-84 | 87 | 91 | 28
84-85|73|101|34
85-86|55|109|53
86-87|62|92|29
Click to expand...
Thanks for that. As ever with Gretzky's prime stats, those numbers boggle the mind.

It does seem that he got rather more secondary assists in 1985/86 than other seasons, but he also got 109 primary...?? That's nutty.


Something else (probably beyond anyone's time/statistical capacity) that would be interesting to know is what percentage of assists were secondary/primary for, say, leading scorers through NHL history.
 
The Panther said:
As we all know, Wayne Gretzky has the longest (from start-of-season) point streak, with 51 games in 1983-84.

Patrick Kane currently has a nice streak going, up to 26 games... which is quite impressive in today's era, since before Gretzky the record was Guy Lafleur's 28.

Anyway, I was wondering about secondary assists. The NHL, compared to international hockey, seems to award them quite generously. I'm curious as to how many of Gretzky's and other players' assists are primary or secondary. Has anyone taken the time to actually break down how many of Gretzky's 1983-84 points were from goals, primary assists, and secondary assists? Likewise, other players (Lemieux, Sundin, Lafleur) who've had long streaks?
Click to expand...

Gretzky naturally always had more primary assists than secondary. Not that it matters to me because an assist is an assist. But I do know that there was sometime in that 51 game streak right near the end that Gretzky got an empty net goal in Chicago just to keep it alive.............with 2 seconds left. So yeah, even the Great One of all people needed a bit of good fortune to keep a streak going. Streaks are hard.
 
Thanks! I knew someone on here would have done this... It's quite interesting data.


There are no firm conclusions to be drawn from the primary/secondary assist thing, although certainly the trend would be that primaries are generally more 'important' than secondaries (with literally hundreds of exceptions, probably, in the case of a Gretzky, but nevertheless...).

But I still wish the NHL had followed a policy of policing secondary assists. I realize mistakes would have been made (esp. pre-instant replay), but nowadays it would be very easy for referees + off-ice officials to determine, with about 98% reliability, whether a secondary assist was really "deserved" or not. I don't think all assists are equal. I'd bet, also, that the difference such a distinction makes would have altered the results of scoring titles in the past, and so on...
 
The Panther said:
What I think I remember seeing on here one time is that someone did a breakdown of Gretzky's 163 assist season in 1985-86, and the result was that (not surprisingly) a disproportionate number of his assists were primary ones...

I thought it would be interesting to do such a breakdown of players' point-scoring streaks, but the math may be beyond anyone's patience...
Click to expand...


someone a few years back had a break down of primary vs secondary assists for all the top playmakers. Gretzky actually had the highest % of primary assists, while also having (obviously) the most assists in total.

edit: someone else posted a similar study in this thread, but it's not the same one I was referring to.
 
The Panther said:
Well, the box-scores exist, obviously. But I wonder, are they trustworthy? Normally, the 'assisting-player' whose name comes first in the scoring summary got the primary assist, right? But are those box-scores accurate?

I actually think I saw someone's breakdown of something like this on here once, but it may have been a very old thread that I saw by chance....
Click to expand...

I've really never though about weather or not if the first assist listed on the box score/score sheet will be the primary assist or not.... I suppose you could watch a bunch of game clips on youtube, then read the box score to see if there is any truth to it... If it is fact then you can go ahead and eliminate all goals that only have one assists and then focus on those that have two assists and eliminate the first listed assist on the score sheet and then you will get your answer..... Sounds like a lot of work to me tho. :laugh:
 
Something that I've noticed is that Kane, Sundin, Crosby, lafleur and Lemieux were all drafted with the number 1 pick. Gretzky of course wasn't drafted.
 
Sentinel said:
Sorry for raising this thread: does this breakdown still exist?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately all the tables were wiped out. The thread is still there (HSP Data: Primary and secondary assists), but of little use as it is.

General info: If you have a dead link like this one:
hfboards.mandatory.com/showthread.php?t=821020

...change it to this to make it work again:
hfboards.mandatory.com/threads/821020
 
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