impossible to know, but he gets the benefit of the doubt.
This is why I don’t like Gretzky dominance debates. Lot more parity nowadays, but people don’t wanna hear that.
This is an interesting topic to me. You're right that there is a lot more parity, because the "unskilled" players have become far more skilled than they once were. I was watching a Michael Mauboussin lecture recently, and the he talked about the "Paradox of Skill" (which he semi-stole from Stephen J Gould), which simply states that as skill increases, luck's effect on outcomes also increases.
What Gould had found was that batting averages of the top baseball players came down from one era to the next, as the skill level of the rest of the league rose. The result is that a player going on a batting streak is more luck based than it used to be. This means the most-skilled players are still the most skilled, but their results are lower than they would have been in a previous era, if the game itself doesn't change. And this is the case for baseball, a game which introduces
far less luck-based results than hockey.
Another interesting point brought up by Mauboussin was reversion to the mean. Basically, the more skilled a player is, the slower their reversion to the mean is. This intuitively makes sense when we compare something like a highly skilled player who has scored 50 goals to a one-trick pony who scored 50 goals (in the same era), Ovechkin vs Cheechoo. The reversion to the mean was swift with Cheechoo, but has come much slower with Ovechkin. So, if this is true, and Gordie Howe's reversion to the mean was so slow that he was still a halfway effective NHL player in his 50's, it seems to me that there's a high chance he'd be an elite player today were he born in 1995 and given the same chances to succeed.
Combining these ideas, it seems to imply that Gordie Howe would, both, be an elite player today were he born in 1995, and not score as many points as he did in the 40's, 50's, and 60's... and 70's (Jesus)... and 1980 (Christ). In the Gretzky debate, this puts me firmly in the group that thinks he'd be the best player in the league (McDavid might be close), but would also not be scoring 200 points.
