Absolutely for Messier, I was going to post a follow-up about him too because Gretzky/Messier is another pairing where one guy always had his foot to the floor offensively while the other guy very obviously changed his scoring rates based on game situation. For example, here are some Gretzky/Messier playoff splits from 1981-87 I have from the HSP:
Edmonton Playoff Scoring, 1981-87:
First two periods:
Gretzky: 46 goals, 92 assists, 138 points
Messier: 32 goals, 38 assists, 70 points
Third period and OT:
Gretzky: 19 goals, 44 assists, 63 points
Messier: 22 goals, 25 assists, 47 points
Third periods starting with a score differential of 1 or less:
Gretzky: 10 goals, 20 assists, 30 points
Messier: 9 goals, 17 assists, 26 points
Third periods starting with a score differential of 3+*:
Gretzky: 4 goals, 15 assists, 19 points
Messier: 5 goals, 2 assists, 7 points
(*-The Oilers rarely trailed by 3+, so this is more or less each players' respective scoring with the Oilers well in front)
It makes no intuitive sense to say that when your team was down by a goal late in a playoff game, you'd rather have Bobby Clarke on the ice than Phil Esposito, or you'd rather have Mark Messier on the ice than Wayne Gretzky, and while I don't think either of those statements are exactly true (Clarke over Esposito is the one that is closer to being actually arguable), they're both surprisingly close even though that would seem like utter craziness to suggest if you based everything on overall scoring numbers.
With Messier, I think there's also some evidence that he picked his spots in the regular season as well. For example, I observed a while back that Edmonton Oiler goalies tended to have worse save percentages in the latter part of the regular season than they did at the start, and theorized it was probably because the skaters stopped caring about trying to play defence once the division title was sewn up and they were doing nothing more than focusing on their personal stats and waiting for the playoffs. But I'm not sure Messier was all that worried about his personal stats. There are two interesting patterns I noticed that kind of suggest that (again in comparison to someone like Gretzky who always showed up for work and got his points), Messier very likely wasn't trying as hard in some games as others.
From 1985-1994, i.e. between when the Oilers won their first Cup and when the Rangers ended their drought, Messier has an interesting pattern of having his scoring drop off right at the end of the regular season, strongly suggesting that he was done with all this regular season nonsense and just wanted the real games to start. In his last six games in each regular season, Messier scored just 48 points in 60 games and was a -3. That's an incredible dropoff for a guy who had a 1.31 PPG and was +167 in 706 GP over that stretch. Normalized to an 80 game schedule, this is what it looks like:
Messier Scoring Results (Normalized to an 80 Game Schedule):
| G | A | Pts | +/- |
| Main part of season | 36 | 72 | 109 | 21 |
| Last 6 games | 21 | 43 | 64 | -4 |
| Playoffs | 39 | 68 | 107 | 28 |
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There's also an interesting split between Gretzky and Messier when it concerns non-Conference games from 1988-1994. Gretzky scored at pretty much exactly the same rate whether he was playing against his own Conference or the opposite one. Mark Messier, however, did not.
1988-91 (Normalized to 80 Game Schedule):
| GP | Pts vs Campbell | Pts vs Wales |
| Gretzky | 80 | 152 | 153 |
| Messier | 80 | 121 | 102 |
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1992-94 (Normalized to 80 Game Schedule):
| GP | Pts vs Campbell | Pts vs Wales |
| Gretzky | 80 | 126 | 128 |
| Messier | 80 | 91 | 101 |
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As an Oiler Messier scored higher against the Campbell, but as a Ranger he scored higher against the Wales. The sample size on this isn't huge but it's big enough for me to think that there is likely something to it. I don't know whether Messier figured he didn't need to try as hard in some games, or (my preferred theory) he partied extra hard on the road the night before games against non-Conference opposition, but it's just another example of how some players are robots while other players aren't. I personally find it pretty difficult to blame players for not trying their hardest when they had little incentive to do so, and no era of the NHL had less incentive for players to try in the regular season than the divisional era with 16/21 teams making the playoffs.
If you have a pure accomplishments focus and you don't really care about how good players were, then maybe none of this matters, because you could argue that every player should be like Wayne Gretzky and give it his all for 60 minutes in all 82 games whether it is 1-1 or 10-1, and if they don't then it's their own fault. But if you are like me and you are primarily interested in how good the players actually were and how much they actually helped their teams win, then context matters since things like points are only a proxy for evaluating talent. There are plenty of reasons why a player's numbers might not exactly reflect their actual playing ability, both positively or negatively, and if you care about their ability then the fact that two-way centers had very situational scoring is crucial. Also, the indication that guys like Messier or Doug Harvey or (other guys that will come up later on) didn't necessarily show up for every regular season game in their entire careers is information that would actually cause you to rate them more highly than otherwise, since it suggests that their playoff performances were more representative of their actual talent than their regular season ones.
