Wayne Gretzky is considered by most to be the greatest hockey player of all time because of his high skill level and insane career stats and accomplishments. Most of his records will never be broken because of how the NHL has changed today compared to when he played. The stat that most people hold as his greatest is his regular season career point total of 2857 points which makes up his record 894 goals and 1963 assists. I personally believe him having more assists than any other player has points while having the most goals is the greatest statistical accomplishment in sports history. Anyways the reason why a hockey player doesn't need to surpass his career point totals to be considered greater than him is because in order for a player to pass his regular season point totals they would need to average 143 points per season for 20 straight seasons. No player in the NHL has scored more than 130 points in a season since the 1990's. I don't need to explain why that is basically impossible in today's NHL but yeah since that isn't possible unless the NHL changes drastically than we shouldn't say no player has a chance of becoming the greatest NHL player in history by surpassing Wayne Gretzky. In my opinion in order for a player to surpass Gretzky they will need to win more awards and Stanley Cups than him while being ahead of everyone else in the NHL as far ahead as he was and for consistently as long as he was too. The chances of anyone even accomplishing that is very hard since all it takes is one bad injury and your chances are gone such as Sidney Crosby's was when he started having concussion problems. We will have to wait and see how close Connor McDavid can get to surpassing Wayne Gretzky as the greatest hockey player of all time.
