Didn’t you just, like this week, in another thread post a top 20 players of all time list that had Crosby at #14(and the 5th highest ranked center) and Mikita nowhere to be found?
i totally forgot about mikita until i was looking at this thread and thinking about whether crosby had passed morenz and was like, wait a minute has he even passed mikita?
it's not like i have a running top 20 list written on my hand that i update every thursday at midnight.
Looking at Mikita's prime playoff career from 60/61 to 72/73:
#1 in points (by one point)
# 6 in PPG (min. of 50 games)
#2 in goals
#3 in GPG (min. of 50 games)
He has the best pre-expansion playoff run of that era (61/62), arguably the 2nd best playoff run overall
He was 3rd in team scoring (2nd in the SCF) in his only Cup win
He was 1st, 2nd, 2nd and 3rd in team scoring in their four other Cup runs
He was T1st, 3rd, T3rd 3rd in the SCF in their other four Cups runs
Looking at Crosby's prime playoff career from 06/07 to 2018:
#1 in points (by 20)
#1 in PPG (by 10%)
#1 in goals
T5 in GPG
He has arguably the 2nd best playoff run of his era
He has been 2nd, 2nd, and 2nd in team scoring (T4, T2, 1st in the SCF) in their three Cup wins
He was 1st in team scoring (2nd in the SCF) in their other Cup run
Crosby has the better Cup winning run, plus two Conn Smythe winning runs
Mikita arguably has the better playoff run
Crosby has the better Cup run performances
SCF performances are a wash
Crosby clearly has the better overall numbers
i totally agree that crosby is the better playoff performer. but like i said, i don't think it's astronomical, and i think the figures you posted corroborate that. their contributions to finals runs are pretty even, small edge to crosby. where crosby climbs way ahead is in his non-finals runs. but as we saw just a couple of months ago, being able to destroy an inferior team in the first round isn't a luxury mikita had for half of his prime, given that half of mikita's playoff prime was during the two-round era (and, as you note, he has the highest scoring two-round playoff run of all time).
not to say that we can discount what crosby did (i.e., destroy ottawa in the first round in 2010, the islanders in 2013, philly a few months ago), or that we can project that mikita would have definitively done the same, but i think it does somewhat mitigate the difference.
Crosby has a 13 year peak:
-not sure why the # of games is important, if anything Crosby's raw numbers are that much more impressive with his missed games
-is almost the leading scorer ( did not have the benefit of his rival missing games so this should be a wash)
-has the significantly higher PPG gap between him and his immediate rival and the field (IMO, made more impressive in a larger league)
-is 2nd goals, 3rd in assists
Crosby should be clearly viewed as the superior per game performer with the added bonus of doing it over four extra seasons.
And it's my understanding that Hull was generally viewed as the #1 threat on the Hawks and drew the tougher matchups like Crosby does.
philosophically, if a guy has a peak of nine straight seasons where he was healthy every year, was one of the two best centers in the league in all but one year, and finished top three in scoring all but one year (he was 4th), i like that more than a guy with nine seasons of the same quality spread out over a longer period. mikita's consistency was phenomenal and to me that's a big plus.
i also don't love per games. we are reasonably certain that, if healthy, crosby would have been the top scorer in '11 and '12, but that's not the same as actually doing it.
and i also don't think you can say that crosby has had a thirteen year peak. he has an eleven year run as a top three scorer. that's longer than mikita's nine year peak run. outside of that, you have crosby's rookie season (6th) and last season (10th), which are certainly prime but i don't think they count as peak. then subtract the abbreviated '08, '11, and '12 seasons, or count them as fractions of seasons, and crosby has an eight year peak (or nine, if you want to add up the partial seasons to "count" as an extra season) stretched out over eleven seasons.
if you want, i don't mind if you slide crosby's rookie season into that peak, but i don't think the 10th counts. outside of his nine year run, mikita has a first good year (15th), and four more good years in the five after his peak (15th/26th/17th/15th/12th). those are (full) seasons crosby hasn't played (yet). do i think crosby will do better in (full) seasons 12, 13, 14 than mikita did? i'd put money on it. but he hasn't done it yet. mikita had a prime of fifteen years (1,063 games, 1,213 points) where he finished outside of the top 15 twice and outside of the top 20 once. he missed 44 games over those fifteen years, and almost half of them were in one season.
it really is a shame that 3/4 crosby's most astronomical seasons ('11, '12, '13, '14) were abbreviated. but crosby's place relative to the pack in his other years are pretty much the same as mikita's.
re: hull, it's my understanding that mikita's line usually was matched up against other teams' top lines and had more defensive responsibilities than hull's line. so i think their advantage vis-a-vis each other evens out.
but like i said, crosby will almost certainly pass mikita. i'm not even saying it's not close right now, or that you can't make a good case for crosby over mikita. but i still have mikita a little ahead because he has the larger body of work, and even if you go the other way i certainly don't think one could say that crosby is definitively ahead of mikita at this point.
