Where do you place Ovechkin on your personal list of the greatest players of all time?

[Midnight Judges]

I seem to remember Hull also being more of a wrist shot guy in close, like Sakic. Ovie more of a perimeter type

Ovie scores from everywhere. He's known for the one-timer but he scores lots of other ways - wristers, deflections, backhanders, toe-drags, dekes, batting it out of the air, etc. You don't get to 822 without having an arsenal of shots.

 

[Michael Farkas]

The fact that there are 1.72 assists for every goal is inextricable from the result that accumulating assists is easier than accumulating goals. We can show this many different ways:

Records:

Most career assists vs goals: 1963 vs 894 (2.2 ratio)
Most assists in a season vs most goals: 163 vs 92 (1.77 ratio)
Highest career APG vs GPG: 1.32 vs .76 (1.74 ratio)
Highest APG season vs GPG season: 2.04 vs 1.18 (1.73)

^^^These ratios aren't anomalous.

The highest assists vs highest goals in virtually any given season is going to validate this over and over again.

It shows that goals are harder to accumulate. So if a player's primary role is to score goals, their point totals are going to be lower - at the same caliber of player - than if their primary role is to pass the puck. In terms of offense, the dedicated goal scorer is playing a more difficult role on a per point basis.

Yeah, we know. That's not what was being discussed exactly.

 

[jigglysquishy]

The fact that there are 1.72 assists for every goal is inextricable from the result that accumulating assists is easier than accumulating goals. We can show this many different ways:

Records:

Most career assists vs goals: 1963 vs 894 (2.2 ratio)
Most assists in a season vs most goals: 163 vs 92 (1.77 ratio)
Highest career APG vs GPG: 1.32 vs .76 (1.74 ratio)
Highest APG season vs GPG season: 2.04 vs 1.18 (1.73)

These are all Gretzky though, who was a playmaker. If you take the highest of all these from non Gretzky people.

Most career assists vs goals: 1249 vs 822 (1.52 ratio)
Most assists in a season vs most goals: 114 vs 86 (1.33 ratio)
Highest career APG vs GPG: 1.13 vs .76 (1.49 ratio)
Highest APG season vs GPG season: 1.52 vs 1.15 (1.32)

There's still a skew, but your numbers massively overstate the skew since it's not about hockey players in general, but about Gretzky's specific playstyle.

 

[MadLuke]

95.30 is higher than 92.86, and there's about 50 seasons between them on the overall leaderboard, but in the end they're about the same level. We are kinda talking at cross-purposes though because you're concentrating on goals, whereas Average VsX is built to look at points.

yes but in theory should not it work for both in a very similar way ? if if give between 2 similar Bure goal scoring season, could it be just by tweaking until it made somewhat wanted result that it work, I am curious what it would look like, even with points does the season a bit too close to each other.

99-00 Points

1.	Jaromír Jágr • PIT	96
2.	Pavel Bure* • FLA	94
3.	Mark Recchi* • PHI	91
4.	Paul Kariya* • MDA	86
5.	Teemu Selänne* • MDA	85

00-01 Points

1.	Jaromír Jágr • PIT	121
2.	Joe Sakic* • COL	118
3.	Patrik Eliáš • NJD	96
4.	Jason Allison • BOS	95
	Alex Kovalev • PIT	95
	Martin Straka • PIT	95
7.	Pavel Bure* • FLA	92

In 00 he outscore the top 10 position in points by 19% Jagr away to be an Art Ross above Kariya-Selanne playing together, in 2001 it was by 3.4% under Allison-Elias, do you feel the VsX capture those 2 season offensive number well.

2001 had 17% more powerplay goals, 9 players scored 40 or more power plays pointsm none in 2000, it was easier for first liner to score a larger proportion of their team goal and Bure team became way worse and scored way less at the same time.

Maybe the way it is clustered the difference in your VsX is bigger than what it look like, 50 place on the board ranking sound like could be a good amount.

Without sitting down and figuring out individual seasons, there's not enough differentiating the players to know which is which at a glance, and that's over 80 years of hockey.

I would have very little clue to judge Conacher era numbers, so I cannot really do it.

 

[rmartin65]

Here are the top 10 (by raw numbers) goal scorers in NHL history. I've run assists/goals. Why is Ovechkin the worst out of all of them?

Gretzky- 1963 assists/894 goals - 2.20
Ovechkin- 663/822 - .81
Howe- 1049/801 - 1.31
Jagr- 1155/766 - 1.51
Brett Hull- 650/741 - .88
Dionne- 1040/731 - 1.42
Esposito- 873/717 - 1.22
Gartner- 627/708 - .89
Messier- 1193/694 - 1.72
Yzerman- 1063/692 - 1.54

 

[MadLuke]

Here are the top 10 (by raw numbers) goal scorers in NHL history. I've run assists/goals. Why is Ovechkin the worst out of all of them?

This is a metric that hurt you for every goal you score, that type of metric, analysis is always a bit suspicious.

It is maybe a good proxy to rate how much better at scoring goal than getting assist a player was, but quite noisy about being good at creating goals without scoring one yourself when you are on the ice or getting assists.

Would Hull scored 100 more goal and gain that title, what would it tell us ? If Ovechkin his the best ever at scoring goal he would start with the hardest job to not be the worst in that metric.

 

[Victorias]

The fact that there are 1.72 assists for every goal is inextricable from the result that accumulating assists is easier than accumulating goals. We can show this many different ways:

Records:

Most career assists vs goals: 1963 vs 894 (2.2 ratio)
Most assists in a season vs most goals: 163 vs 92 (1.77 ratio)
Highest career APG vs GPG: 1.32 vs .76 (1.74 ratio)
Highest APG season vs GPG season: 2.04 vs 1.18 (1.73)

^^^These ratios aren't anomalous.

The highest assists vs highest goals in virtually any given season is going to validate this over and over again.

It shows that goals are harder to accumulate. So if a player's primary role is to score goals, their point totals are going to be lower - at the same caliber of player - than if their primary role is to pass the puck. In terms of offense, the dedicated goal scorer is playing a more difficult role on a per point basis.

Yeah, we know. That's not what was being discussed exactly.

These are all Gretzky though, who was a playmaker. If you take the highest of all these from non Gretzky people.

Most career assists vs goals: 1249 vs 822 (1.52 ratio)
Most assists in a season vs most goals: 114 vs 86 (1.33 ratio)
Highest career APG vs GPG: 1.13 vs .76 (1.49 ratio)
Highest APG season vs GPG season: 1.52 vs 1.15 (1.32)

There's still a skew, but your numbers massively overstate the skew since it's not about hockey players in general, but about Gretzky's specific playstyle.

So, yeah, that’s part of what I was saying.

The original comment was that Ovechkin’s peak season was not that impressive because he barely produced more points than peak Henrik Sedin.

However, it’s silly to compare a 65 goal/47 assist season with a 29 goal/83 assist season because the former is much more difficult to produce. Accordingly, a playmaker like Henrik (who had 74% assists) does not need to have as special a season in order to produce those 112 points as a goal scorer like Ovechkin (42% assists). This is just a matter of accounting and I imagine most would not find surprising or controversial.

Regarding playmakers vs goal scorers vs balanced attackers, I think it’s clear that Ovechkin is a goal scorer and therefore it only makes sense to compare his point totals with other goal scorers - so not Henrik Sedin. However, it’s also a fair point that Ovechkin’s playmaking ability actually gets overstated by rebounds off of his shots.

As rmartin just pointed out, he has become more of a one-dimensional player, but his peak is far beyond that of Henrik, Datsyuk, Thornton and other playmakers who were mentioned because they produced similar point totals.

 

[rmartin65]

This is a metric that hurt you for every goal you score, that type of metric, analysis is a bit suspicious.

It is maybe a good proxy to rate how much better at scoring goal than getting assist a player was, but quite noisy about being good at great goals without scoring one yourself when you are on the ice or getting assist.

Would Hull scored 100 more goal and gain that title, what would it tell us ? If Ovechkin his the best ever at scoring goal he would start with the hardest job to not be the worst in that metric.

It's not my metric, it is one that @Midnight Judges was using. Personally, I wouldn't put any stock in it, but since he used it to show why goals should count for more than assists, I decided to illustrate why it was a poor metric by showing how it shows Ovechkin to be the worst playmaker out of that group.

 

[MadLuke]

It's not my metric, it is one that @Midnight Judges was using. Personally, I wouldn't put any stock in it, but since he used it to show why goals should count for more than assists, I decided to illustrate why it was a poor metric by showing how it shows Ovechkin to be the worst playmaker out of that group.

A ok he was doing the opposite hurting player for getting assist in their points totals.... so we mentaly copy paste my message with a little ctrl-h for assists/goals

 

[Victorias]

It's not my metric, it is one that @Midnight Judges was using. Personally, I wouldn't put any stock in it, but since he used it to show why goals should count for more than assists, I decided to illustrate why it was a poor metric by showing how it shows Ovechkin to be the worst playmaker out of that group.

His comment was simply that assists occur more frequently than goals - it was not a claim about anyone’s playmaking ability. He was not even comparing within players (though he did inadvertently with Gretzky).

Now, if you want to make something of this, it’s clear more of Ovechkin’s points come from goals than do some of the other players. So he is more reliant on goal scoring and less reliant on playmaking. Again, all that means is that his point totals should be compared only with those of similar style players.

It’s ultimately an issue of math: if you add two variables with different means together, the variable with the greater mean (assists) will dominate the total. That’s why you should normalize both means (and standard deviations) before adding them. OR, you can acknowledge that the distributions are different (eg compare goal scorers with other goal scorers).

 

[rmartin65]

His comment was simply that assists occur more frequently than goals - it was not a claim about anyone’s playmaking ability.

The metric he used is flawed (and cherry picked, since only Gretzky among those guys was anywhere near 2 assists/goal). The easy way to show that there are more assists than goals is to just divide assists by goals per team over a season. But he had to try to make a point by bringing up specific players, and used a bad metric.

Now, if you want to make something of this, it’s clear more of Ovechkin’s points come from goals than do some of the other players. So he is more reliant on goal scoring and less reliant on playmaking. Again, all that means is that his point totals should be compared only with those of similar style players.

I think what the numbers (as bad as they are as a metric) show is that the very top tier guys don't have to choose between goals and assists- they can do both. Ovechkin apparently can't, at least not to the same level as other top scorers. This is why uni-threat players are not as valuable as multi-threat players.

 

[seventieslord]

I mean to take an extreme example:

Hamilton Tigers 1920-21 roster and scoring statistics at hockeydb.com

The roster, scoring and goaltender statistics for the 1920-21 Hamilton Tigers playing in the NHL.

www.hockeydb.com

Joe Malone scoring 30 of the teams 92 goals, could have something to do with the roster being much smaller, maybe it all balance out by the end I do not see an issue with your end result, my brain just do not understand what going on.

Roster size, 3x3 overtime, 2 assist by goal vs 1 rules, defenceman offensive contribution, power play vs non power play scoring distribution seem 3 factor that will not be random, change era to era and will fundamentally change the scoring distribution, maybe not a lot but certainly.

What for goals do you think it would look like for Bure 00 vs 01, does it make a significant swing instead of a very small one, look like a good litmus test.

You're 100% correct. If "percentage of teams goals" is a useful and meaningful statistic (a big IF) then it's probably a statistic that needs to be looked at on a year by year basis and compared to peers around the league.

 

[Midnight Judges]

These are all Gretzky though, who was a playmaker. If you take the highest of all these from non Gretzky people.

Most career assists vs goals: 1249 vs 822 (1.52 ratio)
Most assists in a season vs most goals: 114 vs 86 (1.33 ratio)
Highest career APG vs GPG: 1.13 vs .76 (1.49 ratio)
Highest APG season vs GPG season: 1.52 vs 1.15 (1.32)

There's still a skew, but your numbers massively overstate the skew since it's not about hockey players in general, but about Gretzky's specific playstyle.

That’s fair.

 

[Midnight Judges]

It's not my metric, it is one that @Midnight Judges was using. Personally, I wouldn't put any stock in it, but since he used it to show why goals should count for more than assists, I decided to illustrate why it was a poor metric by showing how it shows Ovechkin to be the worst playmaker out of that group.

All you showed was that Ovechkin's role is more of a goal scorer relative to those other guys. I don't think anyone is going to dispute that.

Your assertion that this ratio unto itself indicates worst playmaker is inaccurate.

For example, Mike Gartner played in the extremely high scoring era. His career APG is .44. Ovechkin played most of his career in a DPE. Ovechkin's career APG is .49. But you think Ovie is a worse playmaker by virtue of the fact that he scored way more goals than Gartner?

 

[rmartin65]

All you showed was that Ovechkin's role is more of a goal scorer relative to those other guys. I don't think anyone is going to dispute that.

Why can't Ovechkin do both, though, like the other guys? Why is Ovechkin so unique that he alone among the top tier players is in this category where his job is apparently to score goals and do (basically) nothing else? That list is the top 10 scorers (again, raw data) in NHL history. Is that not who we should be comparing the arguably greatest goal scorer in history to? Who should we compare him to, in your opinion?

Your assertion that this ratio unto itself indicates worst playmaker is inaccurate.

I don't believe it does; I was making a point as to why assists/goals (like you did in an earlier post) was a bad metric.

For example, Mike Gartner played in the extremely high scoring era. His APG is .44. Ovechkin played most of his career in a DPE. His APG is .49. But you think Ovie is a worse playmaker by virtue of the fact that he scored way more goals than Gartner?

Again, I don't. Ovechkin is definitely a superior playmaker than Gartner was (at least, young Ovechkin was).

 

[Michael Farkas]

Ovechkin played 0 minutes and 0 seconds in the DPE.

 

[MadLuke]

Ovechkin played 0 minutes and 0 seconds in the DPE.

That was a reference to the 2011 to 2017 when scoring was below 2.8 goal a game per teams

From 2011 to 2017, average was 2.73 goal per game, 99-00 and 00-01 scoring was around 2.75

It was not 2003-2004 bad, but quite dpeish, specially for the top player has power play opportunity were down a lot

 

[Michael Farkas]

That was a reference to the 2011 to 2017 when scoring was below 2.8 goal a game per teams

From 2011 to 2017, average was 2.73 goal per game, 99-00 and 00-01 scoring was around 2.75

It was not 2003-2004 bad, but quite dpeish, specially for the top player has power play opportunity were down a lot

I figured. But it's not that, that's not how the game was structured, that's not the reason why the game was down in terms of scoring. It's just not the same. I'm not sure why someone would try to pass it off as such. No one calls the 1950's the dead puck era. It may well have been the golden age later in the decade, in fact.

There's just more to the game than averages. Which I'm not directing towards anyone in particular.

 

[Midnight Judges]

Why can't Ovechkin do both, though, like the other guys?

Ovechkin is 10th in assists in his era. Brett Hull was 22nd. Mike Gartner was 24th. And those were weaker talent pools.

Ovechkin is the only player in hockey history who can be top 10 at something in his era, and have a gaggle of people (Pens fans and Canadians) claiming he didn't do the thing he was top 10 in.

 

[MadLuke]

Shots did not get down, save percentage went up that right, this is more taking the baseball expression more than the puck being different.

 

[Midnight Judges]

Why is Ovechkin so unique that he alone among the top tier players is in this category where his job is apparently to score goals and do (basically) nothing else?

Your premise is utterly false.

Ovechkin is top 4 in hits and top 10 in assists since entering the NHL.

He's top 2 in points.

Your claim that he only does 1 thing is utterly incompatible with reality. You seem intent on saying things that aren't true.

 

[Michael Farkas]

See, on a different, deeper level, this is why you can't just click the "easy" button on this kind of stuff. Someone in one of the many Erik Karlsson threads out there tried to pull this, but it really highlights the subtle differences in roles and what contributes to totals (whether they be goal, assist, point, what have you). I wrote this recently...

Since PPO started to normalize in 2011, Karlsson has the 13th most power play goals among d-men in that time. But he's 1st in power play points overall. And 2nd in even strength goals in that time span. So, even if we don't watch him at all for some reason, we clearly know that he's capable of scoring power play goals.

But, maybe, because he was on an absolute dog **** team for years, maybe his services were better used getting those guys much easier power play goals than taking the shot himself because it's unlikely that, say, Zach Smith (famed 100 assist NHLer that he is) can make the setup passes necessary to generate goals even when his team has more guys on the rink.

This is a great example of EK's strength, actually. Balanced attackers > single-source attackers.

It's easy to go "well, 1.7 assists per goal...it's easier to get them." And, by definition, it is. But that's looking at the league. How often are we really talking about the league? How much are we usually talking about the top 10%, 5%, 1% whatever it is of the league? More often than not, right? So that's why it's important to consider how things get amassed, not just the macro part of amassment (word?).

But you look, and there's certain situations where the more challenging part is the setup. And the stronger player has to take on that role. As mentioned with EK, he's great at scoring at even strength - why doesn't he score more on the power play? Does he forget how to? Does he intentionally choose not to? No, it's that he can draw players to him and is more likely to find an unmarked man with the numerical advantage and they can score.

The Jonathan Cheechoo season. 56 goals or whatever it was. What was harder? Having Joe Thornton (and non-threat Nils Ekman, right?) setup a third liner with cross net-line passes or Cheechoo shoveling them into the net in a league where many goalies found out just how poor they were at skating, pushes, and shuffle ability...?

And that's not to make a point against Ovechkin (I think I'm still in an Ovechkin thread) and try to whisk his goals away. Ovechkin scores hard goals. His whole career. Whether he standing in the dot on the power play or whether he singlehandedly ruins the entire Phoenix Coyotes roster, he scores hard goals. All I'm saying is that you can't just take an ax everything and go, "well, these are always harder than these...and these count more than these" and all that kind of stuff. There's a process that makes all of this and if you don't closely look at the process, you're going to make some really bad reads. Like when all the folks got their hands on Corsi and thought Nigel Dawes and Tyler Kennedy were MVP caliber players. Or like you see now with some folks, "how come Zach Aston Reese, and Danton Heinen, and Tomas Tatar are waiting by their phone, they have one zillion widget power" or whatever...it's just not that easy. You get a lot of the way there sometimes, and that's fine for those chart guys. It's great even. But we don't really have that luxury because we're more or less laser focused on the best of the best. So, the granular, the process of it, it's really essential to understanding how they fit into the history of the game.

 

[rmartin65]

Ovechkin is 10th in assists in his era. Brett Hull was 22nd. Mike Gartner was 24th. And those were weaker talent pools.

Ovechkin is the only player in hockey history who can be top 10 at something in his era, and have a gaggle of people (Pens fans and Canadians) claiming he doesn't do the thing he is top 10 in.

If I'm discussing a player whose potentially top 10 or top 20 in all of hockey's history, I would like to see them (when talking about forwards) more than 10th in either goals or assists when looking over the totality of their careers. Ovechkin has only placed top ten in assists three times in his career- 6th, 6th, and 10th. To use a term popular on this board, he has compiled his way to having the 10th most assists from 2005-today.

Nobody is putting Brett Hull or (especially) Mike Gartner anywhere near the top 10. Those are not his historical comparables, IMO, the other players worthy of discussion in the top 10-20 are.

Your premise is utterly false.

Ovechkin is top 4 in hits and top 10 in assists since entering the NHL.

He's top 2 in points.

How you could possibly claim he only does 1 thing is beyond me. You seem intent on saying things that aren't true.

Hits are about as bad a statistic as plus/minus, haha. But yeah, he has a bunch of those.

I think Ovechkin does one thing at a historically great level- scoring goals. And that is a really important thing, so, by extension, he's a really important player historically. But other top-tier players are able to contribute (with regularity, on a season-by season basis, not just by playing more seasons than other players) both by scoring goals and by registering assists, and I don't think that is something that we should overlook when discussing these players.

I mean, Crosby is a pass-first player. He's number 1 in points and assists over his career. He's second in goals. I don't think he's the second best goal scorer of his era, do you?

 

[MadLuke]

Ovechkin is 10th in assists in his era. Brett Hull was 22nd. Mike Gartner was 24th. And those were weaker talent pools.

Ovechkin is the only player in hockey history who can be top 10 at something in his era, and have a gaggle of people (Pens fans and Canadians) claiming he doesn't do the thing he is top 10 in.

As a career extend the his era can become a bit of a stretch when we take totals. Because we start right at the moment the player started so a lot of great assists player of his era will have only shared 10 or less season and would end up below in absolute total, people with significant higher apg that played over 600 games during Ovechkin career like Datsyuk, St-Louis, Jagr, Alfredsson, Barkov, Zetterbeg, Kucherov, Gaudreau, Huberdeau, Ribeiro, D. Sedin, Ray Withney, Richards, Voracek, Mack, Krejci, Elias, etc... will not show up because of volume of games. And those who started later one will have yet to catch on.

Only 48 forward played 1000 games in his era, 22 played 1100 or more.

He his 10 among that group, really hard to have that many assist without playing that level of games, obviously it is a special group 1000+ nhler but again this is a conversation of the greatest of all time, Cogliano, Jordan Staal, Stastny, Gagner, Steen, Ladd, Kunitz, Pominville has great career for people that went into hockey but not great historically.

Among the 48 forward with 1000 games or more, he is
16th in assist per game, just ahead of Mikko Koivu
outside the power play he is 21th of 48 in assist per game, below Eric Staal that did not reach 40 assist since 2013-2014.

Mikko Koivu in assist is not bad, but in a conversation about the greatest of all time the bar get higher.

A bit like how good of goal scorer Crosby would look right now if we consider his era 2006 to now looking at total in a world with no Ovechkin, first with a nice gap with a good one all time like Stamkos and everyone else far behind, does not mean he was a better scorer than player of his era like Kovalchuck-Stamkos or at the very least not as cleanly has that metric would tell.

Mike Bossy has the most goals of his era looking at it like that, but that does not make it automatically a better goal scorer than Gretzky, would it not be of Gretzky Marcel Dionne during his era look insane:

NHL Stats

The official source for NHL Stats including skaters, goalies, teams stats and more.

www.nhl.com

 

[Mohar Ikram]

All time? 8.

Behind Gretzky, Howe, Lemieux, Orr, M. Richard, Beliveau and Crosby.