I recall in 2010 I did a study where I compared the career PPG of players who played a certain number of games in both the WHA and NHL, and averaged out the decline in point totals that were typically observed. It was the first time I had seen such a thing done, and it yielded a result closer to that 0.60 mark; however, I can’t find the spreadsheet and I think I only publicly released the final results as opposed to “showing my work”. Also, IIRC, it was not that scientific as it was based on career totals; I think specifically targeting the seasons directly before/after a player’s WHA stint makes more sense even if it is more difficult.
I took a long list of players to determine the appropriate factor to use. To qualify, a player had to have at least two WHA seasons if they were primarily an NHL player, and at least two NHL seasons if they were primarily a WHA player. They had to be a player typically discussed in this section (arguably ATD/MLD/AAA/AA caliber) and had to be a forward, as forwards can be judged primarily on offensive numbers, and defensemen can’t (and their offensive totals are hugely dependent on whether they got PP time in a given season or not). Players whose positional integrity was uncertain were dropped to be safe (Mark Howe, for example). If a player went “NHL-WHA-NHL” then I used their last two in the NHL, first two in the WHA, last two in the WHA, first two in the NHL. If their career started or ended with the WHA, then there is only one point of comparison instead of two, so I used their first/last two in the respective leagues. If one of the “adjacent” seasons was less than a half season I added the next one in as well, to ensure I was getting a solid sample size. The smaller of the two samples (either WHA or NHL) had to be at least 125 games; if it wasn’t, I would take the next season to make it at least that large. If that was not possible, the player was thrown out (Tom Webster, Gordie Howe). I also left out Wayne Gretzky because he is an extreme outlier in just about any model and this one is no exception.
After collecting who I could off the top of my head, I found the rest of these players by scanning the top-50 all-time leaders for career WHA GP and Pts, then looking at the year by year all-star teams and top-20 in points. Then I looked at the “skater statistics” pages on WHA, checking the oldest and youngest blocks of players for guys who were working their way up to the NHL, or taking it easy after their prime was over. I hope I got everyone. If I didn’t, please let me know.
Name | NHL GP | NHL Pts | WHA GP | WHA Pts | NHL PPG | WHA PPG | Diff
Tardif | 272 | 225 | 303 | 409 | 0.83 | 1.35 | 0.61
Keon | 308 | 221 | 301 | 291 | 0.72 | 0.97 | 0.74
Walton | 292 | 247 | 211 | 281 | 0.85 | 1.33 | 0.64
Dudley | 303 | 173 | 270 | 277 | 0.57 | 1.03 | 0.56
Hull | 183 | 206 | 253 | 373 | 1.13 | 1.47 | 0.76
Bernier | 223 | 145 | 273 | 368 | 0.65 | 1.35 | 0.48
Lacroix | 158 | 70 | 312 | 436 | 0.44 | 1.40 | 0.32
Ftorek | 145 | 131 | 293 | 406 | 0.90 | 1.39 | 0.65
Houle | 290 | 186 | 214 | 257 | 0.64 | 1.20 | 0.53
Stoughton | 272 | 227 | 219 | 179 | 0.83 | 0.82 | 1.02
Henderson | 212 | 159 | 279 | 235 | 0.75 | 0.84 | 0.89
Cloutier | 168 | 217 | 150 | 258 | 1.29 | 1.72 | 0.75
K.Nilsson | 160 | 222 | 158 | 214 | 1.39 | 1.35 | 1.02
Nilsson | 160 | 163 | 144 | 250 | 1.02 | 1.74 | 0.59
Hedberg | 160 | 149 | 145 | 253 | 0.93 | 1.74 | 0.53
Flett | 199 | 95 | 195 | 187 | 0.48 | 0.96 | 0.50
Rogers | 160 | 210 | 160 | 143 | 1.31 | 0.89 | 1.47
McKenzie | 142 | 146 | 179 | 190 | 1.03 | 1.06 | 0.97
Mahovlich | 149 | 173 | 148 | 171 | 1.16 | 1.16 | 1.00
Lukowich | 158 | 141 | 160 | 174 | 0.89 | 1.09 | 0.82
MacDonald | 143 | 151 | 160 | 139 | 1.06 | 0.87 | 1.22
Preston | 202 | 125 | 153 | 110 | 0.62 | 0.72 | 0.86
Nedomansky | 143 | 101 | 174 | 172 | 0.71 | 0.99 | 0.71
Ruskowski | 146 | 129 | 153 | 158 | 0.88 | 1.03 | 0.86
Bordeleau | 144 | 84 | 153 | 176 | 0.58 | 1.15 | 0.51
Williams | 198 | 131 | 139 | 89 | 0.66 | 0.64 | 1.03
Connelly | 147 | 86 | 156 | 165 | 0.59 | 1.06 | 0.55
Lawson | 156 | 39 | 156 | 194 | 0.25 | 1.24 | 0.20
MacMillan | 182 | 113 | 153 | 88 | 0.62 | 0.58 | 1.08
Ullman | 158 | 104 | 144 | 130 | 0.66 | 0.90 | 0.73
Backstrom | 155 | 110 | 148 | 122 | 0.71 | 0.82 | 0.86
Napier | 130 | 80 | 159 | 161 | 0.62 | 1.01 | 0.61
Tonelli | 150 | 100 | 145 | 119 | 0.67 | 0.82 | 0.81
MacGregor | 193 | 110 | 135 | 75 | 0.57 | 0.56 | 1.03
Joyal | 139 | 62 | 194 | 103 | 0.45 | 0.53 | 0.84
McDonald | 171 | 107 | 147 | 70 | 0.63 | 0.48 | 1.31
Hampson | 156 | 59 | 154 | 117 | 0.38 | 0.76 | 0.50
Boudrias | 149 | 106 | 140 | 70 | 0.71 | 0.50 | 1.42
Gendron | 132 | 55 | 127 | 69 | 0.42 | 0.54 | 0.77
Fonteyne | 138 | 32 | 149 | 61 | 0.23 | 0.41 | 0.57
Semenko | 125 | 32 | 142 | 36 | 0.26 | 0.25 | 1.01
Total | 7371 | 5422 | 7548 | 7776 | 0.74 | 1.03 | 0.71
It’s not particularly hard to put together something even more “scientific” than this; however, this is a great improvement on what I did before and it appears intuitively sound, fitting in with what the consensus tends to be about WHA offensive totals.
A couple of notes:
- I probably should have included all players, not just the ones who were at least AA draft caliber. I’m not interested in going back and finding them all, but to be honest I can’t quite justify why their results should not be relevant in a study of how much easier it is to score in the WHA than the NHL. These players would tend to drag that 0.71 figure down, as they are guys who were not special NHL players, hence why we’ve never selected them here.
- Another factor that would technically drag this 0.71 down is that so many of these players played at ages where we know there were likely not in their offensive primes – either quite old or quite young. And then they’re being compared to NHL seasons that were closer to, or in, their prime. If an age-adjusted analysis was possible it would surely drag the final answer down just a bit.
- If you were to “weigh” each player’s factor based on the number of games played and points (i.e. which samples are more significant) the final factor that the table would determine would be 0.76. However, these were arbitrarily selected samples to begin with so I didn’t see the point in adding that factor into it. It could be argued that even if this is valid, the two points above offset that to about the same degree.
- My conclusion as of now (and I welcome comments and criticisms) is that WHA scoring achievements are worth about 71% what NHL scoring achievements in the 1970-1982 range are.