Hockey Outsider
Registered User
- Jan 16, 2005
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One final series of posts (this was from April 1999, about Gretzky vs Lemieux). You can more or less copy and paste this discussion onto HFBoards in 2023:
"RPP": Pure and simple, 99 was a floater and a quitter without heart or passion. All this drooling over this guy is ridiculous. Wayne Gretzky, the king of the floaters, made his reputation by playing in the most offensive and wide open era hockey has ever seen. He did it on a team full of Hall of Famers like Coffey, Messier, Kurri, Anderson. This is how this guy piled up the points and assists. It was not his greatness (WHAT greatness??????), it was his luck to be on such an offensive minded team in the most offensive era in hockey HISTORY. Where is the greatness in that???? Where is the greaness in giving the puck to a hall of famer linemate for 10 years of INJURY FREE play? And his injury free play is no indication of his greatness, its more an indication of Semenko protecting his bony panzy ass, and the league doing the same. He was in a bubble, protected by bodyguards and surrounded by great players for 10 years in Edmonton. Where is the greatness???? 99 retired, good riddance. The Greatest One retired 2 years ago. While the Floating One Wayne Gretzky was being sheltered from opposition hitting him and passing off to hall of famers, Mario Lemieux was taking his lumps from any opposing guy who wanted to take a run at him. He didnt have the NHL offices protecting him, he didnt have a Semenko to protect him. Whats more important is, Mario didnt have Anderson and Kurri or Coffey to pass to and to rack up cheap assists in a wide open game. No, Mario had Bob Errey, Moe Mantha, Doug Bodger or Terry Ruskowski to pass to or to get passes from. Mario put in pain and blood while having no team support at all to make his stats look good and to be artificially inflated like Wayne did. When you see Mario's numbers in the 80s, thats all him, making others look good, making others like Rob Brown or Warren Young into snipers, not Kurri and Anderson making Gretzky look like a play maker. [it goes on and on like this, I already feel like I've given this rant too much space]
"pro...[at]ibm.net" - Um, please explain why it was Gretzky who put up those amazing numbers and not his teammates, or anyone else in the league... While you're at it have a look at the Oiler line-up in his first year (which I included below) and explain how Gretzky, as an *18 yr old kid*, managed to tie Dionne for the scoring title with 137 points. Note that there's no Coffey, Kurri, Anderson, and Messier had only 33 points.... [after posting the roster/stats for the 1980 Oilers] Ooh, what an awesome line-up, eh? Or are you going to claim that Blair MacDonald and Stan Weir were responsible for this 18 year old putting up such numbers? People who like to shit all over Gretzky's accomplishments (or Lemieux's and Orr's for that matter) out themselves as the hockey know-nothings that they truly are.
"David Skipper" - Nobody compares to the accomplishments of Gretzky - not even Mario. You whine as good as Lemieux did, are you related to him?
"pro...[at]ibm.net" - Yeah right. This isn't about comparing Gretzky to Lemieux; they're both great players and I'm not about to go around in circles arguing who's better. You claimed Gretzky's teammates were mostly responsible for his numbers when the evidence clearly shows that even as raw 18 year old on a lousy team he managed what no one before or after was able to accomplish. Hell, he had been doing it since he was a wee lad. As a 10 year old he was filling up minor league arenas with people wanting to see this little "freak" score 386 goals in 80 or so games.
"Ed Igoe" - The basic idea behind Usenet trolling is to post a ridiculous message and then sit back and watch as newcomers (and some veterans) try to tear into it... If the troller's lucky, people will rise to his flame bait, sometimes so vehemently that the newsgroup becomes engulfed in a flamewar that completely drowns out all other discussions...
"Alexander Beeser" - I knew, I just knew that 99's retirement would bring out the mario appologists with a last ditch effort to convince people that over their careers that mario was better than wayne. Here comes the chemo, here comes the back surgeries. The fact is, whether you like to admit it or not, on the ice where it is measured mario lemieux was never, and I mean never, better than gretzky. You can invent all of the useless stats you want, game winning goals on tuesday road games, it still wont amount to nothing. Mario's career will always be precisely where it belongs, in waynes shadow. I don't give a rat's ass about what could have happened if mario was healthy, or had better linemates, or had someone to protect him as a player etc. I will let their play speak for themselves, and in this respect 99 is precisely where he deserves to be, ahead of lemieux. Could mario have been a better player ? Sure but then again I could have made the show if it hadn't had been for me scraping my knee and missing that one practive as a pee-wee.
"User877845" - Gretzky taught Mario how to win. And that's from Mario's mouth, bub.
"RPP" - Edmonton won a cup without Wayne. It was Wayne that went nowhere. Facts are facts, Wayne was a loser who was made to look good by his team mates. Without them he never won another Cup.... He played longer because he was always a babysat baby. Protected by the league, protected by goons like McSorely or Semenko. Mario took his lumps, took the abuse. People ran Mario, they left Wayne alone for fear of what would happen to them. Afterall, the precedent was set when I cant remeber the guy's name, he ran Wayne and hit him hard. He wa soon out of the NHL.
"Dan & Jenn Coleman" - I have to wonder if you were even watching hockey in this time period. There is only one reason that Blair MacDonald had 94 points and there was only one reason that Doug Hicks had 40 points as a defencemen. They were fortunate enough to play on the same team as Gretzky. Blair (B.J.) MacDonald was a marginal NHLer who would only manage 97 more points in 139 games after this (and this in inflated because he got 43 points in 51 games with Edmonton before being traded to Vancouver. Gretzky MADE Blair MacDonald.
"Sonia" - Gretzky had, quite easily, the most incredible career of any professional athlete. His career was better than Mario's, but watching the 2 play, in their primes, and being MAJOR fans of both, it is tough for me to say that Mario was never better than Gretzky. You've heard all the arguments, but simply watching the 2 play and seeing what they did with the puck and what they did with what they were given, I'll have to agree with Bobby Orr and Scotty Bowman in their assertion that Mario was the most talented to ever step on the ice.
"Sonia" - well, I wouldn't call Ron Francis, Paul Coffey, larry Murphy, Mark Recchi, Joe Mullen or Kevin Stevens nobodies... problem is that YOU are closed-minded towards Gretzky's accomplishments. Admitting that Gretzky was an awesome player does not in any way shape, or form take away from Mario's greatness. You really set back the case for Mario, and in fact, tend to turn people against him because of your ridiculous assertions about Gretzky. In other words, you are doing more harm than good, and are convincing exactly NO ONE!... Mairo was a "light" practicer because he hated practice. He was a light practicer from the time he entered the NHL, and had a reputation for being somewhat lazy. He had more god-given skills than any human to ever step on the ice, but there were a few things that prevented him from being the player he *could've* been.
"Joe Ramirez" - It's indisputable that Gretzky would still own the career ppg mark if he hadn't continued to play until the end of the 1990s. Personally, I think he should have retired after his inability to score goals became embarrassing. An ordinary player with 10-20 goals and 60-70 assists per year is making a significant contribution to his team, but Gretzky wasn't an ordinary player. Anyway, it's a fact that, although Lemieux and Gretzky were very close in career ppg for several years, Gretzky did not actually fall below Lemieux until after Lemieux had retired. However, I'm not certain that the "Wayne played too long" rationale also applies to career gpg. Gretzky's last truly good season was 1993-94, in which he scored 130 points. After that season, his career gpg was 0.7137. His last unquestionably "prime," Grezkyesque season was 1990-91, in which he scored 163 points. After that season, Wayne's career gpg was 0.7762. Both of these "alternative career" gpg numbers for Gretzky are significantly lower than Lemieux's career gpg figure of 0.8228. Conclusion: Gretzky did *not* lose the career gpg mark by playing too long. Lemieux earned that record. Of course, whether career gpg is a stat that matters to you is your own business.
"Joe Ramirez" - A final point, for what it's worth, is that players with extremely long careers must accept both the statistical advantages and disadvantages that come with many years of veteran service. People who are inclined to say that Gretzky's career ppg and gpg numbers are misleadingly low because he played well past his prime should ask themselves whether Gretzky's total of 2857 career points is misleadingly high because many of those points were earned in Wayne's past-his-prime years. Should we ignore the last 800 points because they weren't tallied by the "real" Wayne? I didn't think so.
"Alexander Beeser" - Because as a fan of the game, untill lemieux came along, no one ever touted goals per game as a meaningful stat. Yet when it became clear that mario wouldn't ever catch wayne in any of the pre-existing stats of value, a whole bunch of lemieux appologists starting touting this stat as one of value... I see the preponderance of people beginning to use this stat as simply then ends justifying the means to try and convince themselves or others that mario was either as good or better than wayne was. I'm convinced, that if gpg ended up with mario on the short end, this stat would have been discarded and another "invented" stat would come along as long as the mario came out on top.
"Daryl Turner" - [re Lemieux potentially reaching 200 points in 1989] - Correction. Mario missed *4* games that season. It was an 80 game schedule, so, with 4 "average" games, he would have 209 or 210 points. By the same logic, in 1983-84, Gretzky missed 6 games when he scored *only* 205 points in 74 games. If Gretzky had played those games averagely, he would have score 221 or 222 points that season.
"Joe Ramirez" - It's true that Lemieux defenders focus on the per-game stats; in every sport, great players with relatively short careers are defined more by their game or season averages than by their cumulative career totals. (Did you read any of the articles that followed Joe DiMaggio's death? He had a 13-year career, and as a result is not anywhere the top in such categories as most career homers, hits, RBIs, etc. Yet baseball analysts persist in declaring him one of the best ever to play the game. Some who actually saw him play insist he was *the* best... All it means is that hockey, like baseball, football, basketball, etc., has become the subject of increasingly detailed mathematical analysis over the years. New ways of sifting and sorting the data are constantly being created. Some become popular, and some do not. In my opinion, gpg and ppg stats have become popular because they help answer the natural questions that fans have about players' day-to-day performance. After all, we rate goalies by goals-per-game, don't we? Scoring gpg and ppg stats have caught on because they are helpful.
"Alexander Beeser" - Rotisserie geeks keep track of everything, including ridiculous stats like most game winners on the road on back to back games. Yes these stats are real, and they do have meaning, but ascribing what this meaning is in the context of a ranking function, is something I defy you or anyone else to define.... Now, in face of the fact that in EVERY major categories that have traditionally been touted as legit, lemieux loses, people keep fishing for one stat to upon which they can base their entire argument for 66's supremacy. This is the crux of my end justifying the means comment.
"Chris Bailey" - You should watch a video of the 1987 Canada Cup finals between team Canada & the USSR. Not to discount how well Gretzky played, but Lemieux was the difference in that series.
"Alexander Beeser" - To illustrate this example, lets argue that mario lemieux played every freaking game he was physically possible and define this number of games as the duration in question, now take precisely this amount of games of gretz's career and see who comes out ahead in gpg or ppg. Now lemieux has stopped playing so his gpg is the same, but gretzky, who is unquestionably as asset to his team ( lemieux could be but chose not to) his gpg and ppg will decrease. so essentially your punishing the guy who is still helping his team (at a lower clip) and rewarding the guy who by every account could still play as a dominating player but choses not to. If this isn't biased, then I don't know what is.
"_me" - Evidence that regardless of what Mario wuold do, he would never get credit compared to the Great One. The next year, he outscored Gretzky by 31 goals and finished 199 points to Gretzky's 168, yet still didn't get the Hart. Rodney Dangerfield, eat your heart out!
"steve...[at]my-dejanews.com" - Uhh. Wasn't it Mario who quit? He complained that he didn't like the game. Mario retired not because he couldn't play but because he didn't want to play. Wayne played 20 seasons. You call that a quitter?
That's pretty how much how a typical Gretzky vs Lemieux argument goes today, almost 25 years later!
"RPP": Pure and simple, 99 was a floater and a quitter without heart or passion. All this drooling over this guy is ridiculous. Wayne Gretzky, the king of the floaters, made his reputation by playing in the most offensive and wide open era hockey has ever seen. He did it on a team full of Hall of Famers like Coffey, Messier, Kurri, Anderson. This is how this guy piled up the points and assists. It was not his greatness (WHAT greatness??????), it was his luck to be on such an offensive minded team in the most offensive era in hockey HISTORY. Where is the greatness in that???? Where is the greaness in giving the puck to a hall of famer linemate for 10 years of INJURY FREE play? And his injury free play is no indication of his greatness, its more an indication of Semenko protecting his bony panzy ass, and the league doing the same. He was in a bubble, protected by bodyguards and surrounded by great players for 10 years in Edmonton. Where is the greatness???? 99 retired, good riddance. The Greatest One retired 2 years ago. While the Floating One Wayne Gretzky was being sheltered from opposition hitting him and passing off to hall of famers, Mario Lemieux was taking his lumps from any opposing guy who wanted to take a run at him. He didnt have the NHL offices protecting him, he didnt have a Semenko to protect him. Whats more important is, Mario didnt have Anderson and Kurri or Coffey to pass to and to rack up cheap assists in a wide open game. No, Mario had Bob Errey, Moe Mantha, Doug Bodger or Terry Ruskowski to pass to or to get passes from. Mario put in pain and blood while having no team support at all to make his stats look good and to be artificially inflated like Wayne did. When you see Mario's numbers in the 80s, thats all him, making others look good, making others like Rob Brown or Warren Young into snipers, not Kurri and Anderson making Gretzky look like a play maker. [it goes on and on like this, I already feel like I've given this rant too much space]
"pro...[at]ibm.net" - Um, please explain why it was Gretzky who put up those amazing numbers and not his teammates, or anyone else in the league... While you're at it have a look at the Oiler line-up in his first year (which I included below) and explain how Gretzky, as an *18 yr old kid*, managed to tie Dionne for the scoring title with 137 points. Note that there's no Coffey, Kurri, Anderson, and Messier had only 33 points.... [after posting the roster/stats for the 1980 Oilers] Ooh, what an awesome line-up, eh? Or are you going to claim that Blair MacDonald and Stan Weir were responsible for this 18 year old putting up such numbers? People who like to shit all over Gretzky's accomplishments (or Lemieux's and Orr's for that matter) out themselves as the hockey know-nothings that they truly are.
"David Skipper" - Nobody compares to the accomplishments of Gretzky - not even Mario. You whine as good as Lemieux did, are you related to him?
"pro...[at]ibm.net" - Yeah right. This isn't about comparing Gretzky to Lemieux; they're both great players and I'm not about to go around in circles arguing who's better. You claimed Gretzky's teammates were mostly responsible for his numbers when the evidence clearly shows that even as raw 18 year old on a lousy team he managed what no one before or after was able to accomplish. Hell, he had been doing it since he was a wee lad. As a 10 year old he was filling up minor league arenas with people wanting to see this little "freak" score 386 goals in 80 or so games.
"Ed Igoe" - The basic idea behind Usenet trolling is to post a ridiculous message and then sit back and watch as newcomers (and some veterans) try to tear into it... If the troller's lucky, people will rise to his flame bait, sometimes so vehemently that the newsgroup becomes engulfed in a flamewar that completely drowns out all other discussions...
"Alexander Beeser" - I knew, I just knew that 99's retirement would bring out the mario appologists with a last ditch effort to convince people that over their careers that mario was better than wayne. Here comes the chemo, here comes the back surgeries. The fact is, whether you like to admit it or not, on the ice where it is measured mario lemieux was never, and I mean never, better than gretzky. You can invent all of the useless stats you want, game winning goals on tuesday road games, it still wont amount to nothing. Mario's career will always be precisely where it belongs, in waynes shadow. I don't give a rat's ass about what could have happened if mario was healthy, or had better linemates, or had someone to protect him as a player etc. I will let their play speak for themselves, and in this respect 99 is precisely where he deserves to be, ahead of lemieux. Could mario have been a better player ? Sure but then again I could have made the show if it hadn't had been for me scraping my knee and missing that one practive as a pee-wee.
"User877845" - Gretzky taught Mario how to win. And that's from Mario's mouth, bub.
"RPP" - Edmonton won a cup without Wayne. It was Wayne that went nowhere. Facts are facts, Wayne was a loser who was made to look good by his team mates. Without them he never won another Cup.... He played longer because he was always a babysat baby. Protected by the league, protected by goons like McSorely or Semenko. Mario took his lumps, took the abuse. People ran Mario, they left Wayne alone for fear of what would happen to them. Afterall, the precedent was set when I cant remeber the guy's name, he ran Wayne and hit him hard. He wa soon out of the NHL.
"Dan & Jenn Coleman" - I have to wonder if you were even watching hockey in this time period. There is only one reason that Blair MacDonald had 94 points and there was only one reason that Doug Hicks had 40 points as a defencemen. They were fortunate enough to play on the same team as Gretzky. Blair (B.J.) MacDonald was a marginal NHLer who would only manage 97 more points in 139 games after this (and this in inflated because he got 43 points in 51 games with Edmonton before being traded to Vancouver. Gretzky MADE Blair MacDonald.
"Sonia" - Gretzky had, quite easily, the most incredible career of any professional athlete. His career was better than Mario's, but watching the 2 play, in their primes, and being MAJOR fans of both, it is tough for me to say that Mario was never better than Gretzky. You've heard all the arguments, but simply watching the 2 play and seeing what they did with the puck and what they did with what they were given, I'll have to agree with Bobby Orr and Scotty Bowman in their assertion that Mario was the most talented to ever step on the ice.
"Sonia" - well, I wouldn't call Ron Francis, Paul Coffey, larry Murphy, Mark Recchi, Joe Mullen or Kevin Stevens nobodies... problem is that YOU are closed-minded towards Gretzky's accomplishments. Admitting that Gretzky was an awesome player does not in any way shape, or form take away from Mario's greatness. You really set back the case for Mario, and in fact, tend to turn people against him because of your ridiculous assertions about Gretzky. In other words, you are doing more harm than good, and are convincing exactly NO ONE!... Mairo was a "light" practicer because he hated practice. He was a light practicer from the time he entered the NHL, and had a reputation for being somewhat lazy. He had more god-given skills than any human to ever step on the ice, but there were a few things that prevented him from being the player he *could've* been.
"Joe Ramirez" - It's indisputable that Gretzky would still own the career ppg mark if he hadn't continued to play until the end of the 1990s. Personally, I think he should have retired after his inability to score goals became embarrassing. An ordinary player with 10-20 goals and 60-70 assists per year is making a significant contribution to his team, but Gretzky wasn't an ordinary player. Anyway, it's a fact that, although Lemieux and Gretzky were very close in career ppg for several years, Gretzky did not actually fall below Lemieux until after Lemieux had retired. However, I'm not certain that the "Wayne played too long" rationale also applies to career gpg. Gretzky's last truly good season was 1993-94, in which he scored 130 points. After that season, his career gpg was 0.7137. His last unquestionably "prime," Grezkyesque season was 1990-91, in which he scored 163 points. After that season, Wayne's career gpg was 0.7762. Both of these "alternative career" gpg numbers for Gretzky are significantly lower than Lemieux's career gpg figure of 0.8228. Conclusion: Gretzky did *not* lose the career gpg mark by playing too long. Lemieux earned that record. Of course, whether career gpg is a stat that matters to you is your own business.
"Joe Ramirez" - A final point, for what it's worth, is that players with extremely long careers must accept both the statistical advantages and disadvantages that come with many years of veteran service. People who are inclined to say that Gretzky's career ppg and gpg numbers are misleadingly low because he played well past his prime should ask themselves whether Gretzky's total of 2857 career points is misleadingly high because many of those points were earned in Wayne's past-his-prime years. Should we ignore the last 800 points because they weren't tallied by the "real" Wayne? I didn't think so.
"Alexander Beeser" - Because as a fan of the game, untill lemieux came along, no one ever touted goals per game as a meaningful stat. Yet when it became clear that mario wouldn't ever catch wayne in any of the pre-existing stats of value, a whole bunch of lemieux appologists starting touting this stat as one of value... I see the preponderance of people beginning to use this stat as simply then ends justifying the means to try and convince themselves or others that mario was either as good or better than wayne was. I'm convinced, that if gpg ended up with mario on the short end, this stat would have been discarded and another "invented" stat would come along as long as the mario came out on top.
"Daryl Turner" - [re Lemieux potentially reaching 200 points in 1989] - Correction. Mario missed *4* games that season. It was an 80 game schedule, so, with 4 "average" games, he would have 209 or 210 points. By the same logic, in 1983-84, Gretzky missed 6 games when he scored *only* 205 points in 74 games. If Gretzky had played those games averagely, he would have score 221 or 222 points that season.
"Joe Ramirez" - It's true that Lemieux defenders focus on the per-game stats; in every sport, great players with relatively short careers are defined more by their game or season averages than by their cumulative career totals. (Did you read any of the articles that followed Joe DiMaggio's death? He had a 13-year career, and as a result is not anywhere the top in such categories as most career homers, hits, RBIs, etc. Yet baseball analysts persist in declaring him one of the best ever to play the game. Some who actually saw him play insist he was *the* best... All it means is that hockey, like baseball, football, basketball, etc., has become the subject of increasingly detailed mathematical analysis over the years. New ways of sifting and sorting the data are constantly being created. Some become popular, and some do not. In my opinion, gpg and ppg stats have become popular because they help answer the natural questions that fans have about players' day-to-day performance. After all, we rate goalies by goals-per-game, don't we? Scoring gpg and ppg stats have caught on because they are helpful.
"Alexander Beeser" - Rotisserie geeks keep track of everything, including ridiculous stats like most game winners on the road on back to back games. Yes these stats are real, and they do have meaning, but ascribing what this meaning is in the context of a ranking function, is something I defy you or anyone else to define.... Now, in face of the fact that in EVERY major categories that have traditionally been touted as legit, lemieux loses, people keep fishing for one stat to upon which they can base their entire argument for 66's supremacy. This is the crux of my end justifying the means comment.
"Chris Bailey" - You should watch a video of the 1987 Canada Cup finals between team Canada & the USSR. Not to discount how well Gretzky played, but Lemieux was the difference in that series.
"Alexander Beeser" - To illustrate this example, lets argue that mario lemieux played every freaking game he was physically possible and define this number of games as the duration in question, now take precisely this amount of games of gretz's career and see who comes out ahead in gpg or ppg. Now lemieux has stopped playing so his gpg is the same, but gretzky, who is unquestionably as asset to his team ( lemieux could be but chose not to) his gpg and ppg will decrease. so essentially your punishing the guy who is still helping his team (at a lower clip) and rewarding the guy who by every account could still play as a dominating player but choses not to. If this isn't biased, then I don't know what is.
"_me" - Evidence that regardless of what Mario wuold do, he would never get credit compared to the Great One. The next year, he outscored Gretzky by 31 goals and finished 199 points to Gretzky's 168, yet still didn't get the Hart. Rodney Dangerfield, eat your heart out!
"steve...[at]my-dejanews.com" - Uhh. Wasn't it Mario who quit? He complained that he didn't like the game. Mario retired not because he couldn't play but because he didn't want to play. Wayne played 20 seasons. You call that a quitter?
That's pretty how much how a typical Gretzky vs Lemieux argument goes today, almost 25 years later!
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