“Double-unofficial” 50 in 50

[vadim sharifijanov]

I get what it is, but it’s completely arbitrary. No other meaningful stat is tracked from the beginning of the season. Nothing about goalscoring is enhanced by doing it early in the season as opposed to later.

It gets even more silly when players get disqualified if they miss the beginning of the season. Why would that be disqualifying for a personal performance metric? It’s totally arbitrary to say they’re disqualified because the first 50 games of the season hold more value. No, they don’t. Nobody thinks that is true on any topic other than trying to explain this stat.

The video game comparison doesn’t work here. The first 50 games of an NHL season aren’t the only ones that count. The whole season counts. Players and teams that can’t figure that out, usually don’t do so well in the springtime.

my understanding of 50 in 50 is that it is implicitly a comparison between maurice richard's legendary season with future creme de la creme goal scorers. so giving only the team's first 50 games evens the playing field with the conditions of richard's 50 goal year.

i'm pretty sure i read exactly this explanation sometime in '91 when hull was approaching his first 50 in 50.

but obviously there are many other equally, if not more, meaningful ways we can chart guys' 50 game scoring binges.

 

[tarheelhockey]

It’s just a special little thing, it’s not the same as how many goals someone scored in a season. All goals count.

It’s similar to saying who the first was to get to 50 goals in a season, except this record has an added time limit on it.

You could say “who cares who got to 50 goals first, it’s where you end up that matters. All goals count.” And you’d be right. But it doesn’t change when in the season someone hits 50 (earlier or later) is pretty special.

Just wait until someone does it for real, and you’ll be able to tell why doing it earlier is a special kind of cool.

It doesn’t at all take away from scoring over 1 gpg over a 50 game span. That’s just not what the record is about

I've seen seasons where someone did it in the official way. The reason it's a "special kind of cool" is because the NHL gets behind it with official hype (aka a marketing push). But the actual achievement is not different -- Auston Matthews in 2022 is not less impressive or less hype-worthy than Jari Kurri in 1985. Celebrating it in only this narrowly-defined way creates an artificial rarity, that's all.

It's like saying you only get credit for a shorthanded goal if you score it in the first period. Sure, there would be a lot less SHGs and the announcers would be like "wow, that one will stand as an official SHG! We haven't seen one of those in a while!". But there's no actual rational reason why that should be different than scoring it in the third period, and the added hype is entirely the result of putting an arbitrary limit in place to induce a deliberate false rarity.

my understanding of 50 in 50 is that it is implicitly a comparison between maurice richard's legendary season with future creme de la creme goal scorers. so giving only the team's first 50 games evens the playing field with the conditions of richard's 50 goal year.

i'm pretty sure i read exactly this explanation sometime in '91 when hull was approaching his first 50 in 50.

That's the explanation as of 1981, but that explanation did not exist (at least not as far as I have ever seen) prior to Bossy. Meaning Esposito actually did score 50 in 50 at a time when there was no explicit rule that it shouldn't count. That was ignored for a decade, then retconned with a new rule. By '91 there had been a decade for people to internalize and rationalize that rule.

 

[ContrarianGoaltender]

I get what it is, but it’s completely arbitrary. No other meaningful stat is tracked from the beginning of the season. Nothing about goalscoring is enhanced by doing it early in the season as opposed to later.

It gets even more silly when players get disqualified if they miss the beginning of the season. Why would that be disqualifying for a personal performance metric? It’s totally arbitrary to say they’re disqualified because the first 50 games of the season hold more value. No, they don’t. Nobody thinks that is true on any topic other than trying to explain this stat.

The video game comparison doesn’t work here. The first 50 games of an NHL season aren’t the only ones that count. The whole season counts. Players and teams that can’t figure that out, usually don’t do so well in the springtime.

Just going to echo a few others here and say I'm really not sure I agree that arbitrary is the right choice of word here.

First of all, it seems to be a pretty universal phenomenon in sports that when the schedule length increases, a bunch of oldtimers try to make adjustments for the disadvantage faced by older players. The most famous example of this is the official asterisk that baseball put on Roger Maris' 61 home runs in 1961, because it took him more than the 154 games that Babe Ruth played in 1927. They made that distinction over a whopping 8 games, compare that to the NHL schedule length which has increased by more than 60% since 1944-45. It's not like a number was randomly plucked out of the air, 50 games was a full season back then. It's perfectly correct to argue that this is by now completely outdated and anachronistic in a league that has been scheduled to play 80+ games for over four decades now, in the same way that baseball eventually removed that asterisk, but in both cases that doesn't really make it arbitrary, per se.

Secondly, as already pointed out in this thread, I think you're somewhat overlooking the fact that many stats are expressed as the "fastest to X". Fastest to 1000 points, fastest to 500 goals, fastest to 250 wins, and so on. Chasing 50 in 50 is really another way of seeing how fast a player can get to 50 goals. And I think there's a bit more of a romance to it in particular because scoring 50 has become an iconic target round number that defines elite goal scorers more than any other statistical benchmark defines any other player type. Scoring your 58th or your 63rd or whatever to complete a stretch of 50-in-50 just doesn't have the same cachet.

As for your claim that no other meaningful stat is tracked from the start of a season, I think you're very much overestimating the importance placed on all split stats relative to seasonal stats. Every "single season" stat is tracked from the start of a season, and even among sophisticated observers like the participants on this forum those stats probably make up a significant majority of the inputs for player ratings.

I think there is a fundamental difference in the typical fan's imagination for year-to-date numbers than for midseason splits. Even in an age with access to exponentially more information, there are far fewer people going to NHL.com and choosing segments between specific dates than there are just looking up the current statistical leaderboards. Many players have had hot or cold streaks towards the middle or end of a year while largely escaping notice in the wider hockey world because it mostly blends into their overall season totals. My impression of awards voting for NHL history in the pre-Internet era is that the recipients were usually effectively determined well before the end of the season, because people had been checking the scoring charts on a regular basis for the entire season and that was reinforcing certain narratives about the players, and you pretty much had to pore over newspaper box scores with a calculator if you wanted to get any kind of split stats beyond the official tables. You can argue that this is something of a blind spot, that it is really an artifact of availability bias, that goals and wins count the same whether it is game 1 or game 82, and I'd say you wouldn't even be wrong. But again I'm not sure I'd call it arbitrary.

The last reason that I'm less comfortable handwaving this all away, on the History forum specifically, is that players have highly prized hitting that benchmark. I watched a bunch of Mike Bossy interviews, for example, and it's obvious that he really, really wanted to score 50 in 50. He considered that to be a notable achievement, so much so that I think it throws a lot of doubt on your narrative of the historical evolution of that standard.

Of course you could say that the players only cared because it got unreasonably and undeservingly hyped up, but you can say that about a lot of things that people value ("Why do a bunch of grown men and entire cities full of sports fans care about a silly silver cup?"). This has probably been reduced somewhat in the last 40 years, perhaps as the target seemed less attainable, but if lots of people view something as important than I think you have to at the very least interpret their behaviours accordingly.

I personally don't make any distinction between the first 50 games and any other 50 game stretch, Auston Matthews is on a historically significant goal scoring tear this year by any relevant standard. Yet at the same time, I think I can sort of understand the reasons why others might.

 

[tarheelhockey]

Just going to echo a few others here and say I'm really not sure I agree that arbitrary is the right choice of word here.

First of all, it seems to be a pretty universal phenomenon in sports that when the schedule length increases, a bunch of oldtimers try to make adjustments for the disadvantage faced by older players. The most famous example of this is the official asterisk that baseball put on Roger Maris' 61 home runs in 1961, because it took him more than the 154 games that Babe Ruth played in 1927. They made that distinction over a whopping 8 games, compare that to the NHL schedule length which has increased by more than 60% since 1944-45. It's not like a number was randomly plucked out of the air, 50 games was a full season back then. It's perfectly correct to argue that this is by now completely outdated and anachronistic in a league that has been scheduled to play 80+ games for over four decades now, in the same way that baseball eventually removed that asterisk, but in both cases that doesn't really make it arbitrary, per se.

The way it played out historically appears to have been pretty arbitrary, though. It's not like a bunch of people got together and devised a sound rational policy. People didn't even notice that Esposito had equaled the mark when it happened. Even after being pointed out, it was simply ignored. The NHL had no stance on the topic. Only when Bossy hit 50 in the first 50 did the concept of "first 50" get talked about, and at some point after that the idea was uploaded to NHL policy. That's pretty darn arbitrary.

Secondly, as already pointed out in this thread, I think you're somewhat overlooking the fact that many stats are expressed as the "fastest to X". Fastest to 1000 points, fastest to 500 goals, fastest to 250 wins, and so on. Chasing 50 in 50 is really another way of seeing how fast a player can get to 50 goals. And I think there's a bit more of a romance to it in particular because scoring 50 has become an iconic target round number that defines elite goal scorers more than any other statistical benchmark defines any other player type. Scoring your 58th or your 63rd or whatever to complete a stretch of 50-in-50 just doesn't have the same cachet.

There is no 1000-in-1000 or 500-in-500 club that gets officially tracked by the NHL while others are ignored. If there were, we would have the same discussion.

"Fastest to X" is a different type of statistic, more comparable to simply holding the goals record.

As for your claim that no other meaningful stat is tracked from the start of a season, I think you're very much overestimating the importance placed on all split stats relative to seasonal stats. Every "single season" stat is tracked from the start of a season, and even among sophisticated observers like the participants on this forum those stats probably make up a significant majority of the inputs for player ratings.

Of course all season stats are tracked from the start of the season. I mean we're not giving extra credit for 100 points if it gets scored in the first X games. We simply look at the season and ask "did this player score 100 points, yes or no?". Achieving statistical marks within specific windows of X games isn't meaningful in any broad sense, at least not any more than achieving a single-game statistical mark within an arbitrary X minutes.

I think there is a fundamental difference in the typical fan's imagination for year-to-date numbers than for midseason splits. Even in an age with access to exponentially more information, there are far fewer people going to NHL.com and choosing segments between specific dates than there are just looking up the current statistical leaderboards. Many players have had hot or cold streaks towards the middle or end of a year while largely escaping notice in the wider hockey world because it mostly blends into their overall season totals. My impression of awards voting for NHL history in the pre-Internet era is that the recipients were usually effectively determined well before the end of the season, because people had been checking the scoring charts on a regular basis for the entire season and that was reinforcing certain narratives about the players, and you pretty much had to pore over newspaper box scores with a calculator if you wanted to get any kind of split stats beyond the official tables. You can argue that this is something of a blind spot, that it is really an artifact of availability bias, that goals and wins count the same whether it is game 1 or game 82, and I'd say you wouldn't even be wrong. But again I'm not sure I'd call it arbitrary.

This is absolutely right. People followed Esposito's race for 50 very closely until the end of the 50th game, at which point all the attention dissipated. Nobody was out there keeping game logs of individual players (well... maybe someone was, but that guy probably didn't leave his basement often enough to have a job in the media) so the milestone went by without any notice.

The one person who really might have brought it to light was the NHL's official statistician, Ron Andrews, who presumably did have access to all of the players' game logs and the motive/opportunity to examine them regularly. It appears that he simply missed it until after the fact, like everyone else.

Andrews was in an interesting position at a time when records were being smashed because of expansion/WHA impacts having watered down the league. When a race against Richard occasionally came up, he often went out of his way to point out that Richard's mark was set during a wartime season and shouldn't be viewed any differently than an expansion record. Interesting guy who clearly had inclinations toward both the objective numbers and the subjective historical interpretation.

The last reason that I'm less comfortable handwaving this all away, on the History forum specifically, is that players have highly prized hitting that benchmark. I watched a bunch of Mike Bossy interviews, for example, and it's obvious that he really, really wanted to score 50 in 50. He considered that to be a notable achievement, so much so that I think it throws a lot of doubt on your narrative of the historical evolution of that standard.

Of course he did, the popular focus was always on the first 50-games for reasons described immediately above. I don't see why that would throw doubt on anything else I've said.

The question is whether cultural inertia should overrule the fact that we have the tools at hand to measure things correctly and distribute credit where it's due. The fact that this topic was driven by newspaper leaderboards 50 years ago isn't a good reason for that practice to continue today.

 

[Strangle]

I've seen seasons where someone did it in the official way. The reason it's a "special kind of cool" is because the NHL gets behind it with official hype (aka a marketing push). But the actual achievement is not different -- Auston Matthews in 2022 is not less impressive or less hype-worthy than Jari Kurri in 1985. Celebrating it in only this narrowly-defined way creates an artificial rarity, that's all.

No one is saying the achievement is less impressive or that it is less hype-worthy. Scoring at a goal per game pace for 50 games, scoring 50+ goals in any 50 game span is amazing. It’s just not 50 goals 50 games into the season. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different.

And I’d like to address the use of the term ‘arbitrary’ that was in your previous post and that I’ve seen thrown around a lot. Isn’t it even more arbitrary to pick 50 goals in any 50 games than it is to pick 50 in the first 50?

I fail to see how your classification isn’t arbitrary, but the NHL’s is.

It's like saying you only get credit for a shorthanded goal if you score it in the first period. Sure, there would be a lot less SHGs and the announcers would be like "wow, that one will stand as an official SHG! We haven't seen one of those in a while!". But there's no actual rational reason why that should be different than scoring it in the third period, and the added hype is entirely the result of putting an arbitrary limit in place to induce a deliberate false rarity.

The reason is the point of the season someone has managed to score 50 goals. The earlier in the season someone reaches 50, the more impressive it is. The less games it takes someone to score 50 at any other point in the season is equally impressive, but it’s just not as early in the season and it’s not something that the NHL officially tracks.

We can track it though, and celebrate it.

It’s like a race. And it’s very very rare for someone to manage to score 50 goals before the 51st game of the NHL season. But it’s been done, and that’s why it is tracked. Before it was done, no one tracked it. But after someone achieved it, the NHL started keeping it as a record.

This isn’t hard to understand, I don’t think.

That's the explanation as of 1981, but that explanation did not exist (at least not as far as I have ever seen) prior to Bossy. Meaning Esposito actually did score 50 in 50 at a time when there was no explicit rule that it shouldn't count. That was ignored for a decade, then retconned with a new rule. By '91 there had been a decade for people to internalize and rationalize that rule.

Okay? So what?

I don’t even understand your argument at this point. Are you trying to get the NHL to treat 50 in 50 as a record that ignores the point of the season it occurs in? That it expands the official stance on it?

If that happens, wouldn’t there still be a distinction for people who have done it faster? I know doing it in less games would be a thing, but what’s so offensive to you to let the league celebrate reaching 50 goals as early in the season as possible?

Put it like this, if Matthews score his 51st goal in the 50th game, he’d have been miles ahead of the rest of the league and have another 32 games to add to his total.

Scoring his 51st goal in the 69th game, or whatever it was, means that he isn’t as far ahead of 2nd place for the rocket and only has another 13 games to add to his total.

Getting a gpg pace for 50 games is incredibly impressive and worth celebrating and comparing and talking about. It’s damn exciting! But it’s not the same as if we still had 32 games left of the season to play.

 

[tarheelhockey]

No one is saying the achievement is less impressive or that it is less hype-worthy.

The NHL says that.

And I’d like to address the use of the term ‘arbitrary’ that was in your previous post and that I’ve seen thrown around a lot. Isn’t it even more arbitrary to pick 50 goals in any 50 games than it is to pick 50 in the first 50?

I fail to see how your classification isn’t arbitrary, but the NHL’s is.

No, it is not less arbitrary to look at the entire schedule as equal than to pick one part of it to treat as more-special.

The reason is the point of the season someone has managed to score 50 goals. The earlier in the season someone reaches 50, the more impressive it is. The less games it takes someone to score 50 at any other point in the season is equally impressive, but it’s just not as early in the season and it’s not something that the NHL officially tracks.

We can track it though, and celebrate it.

It’s like a race. And it’s very very rare for someone to manage to score 50 goals before the 51st game of the NHL season. But it’s been done, and that’s why it is tracked. Before it was done, no one tracked it. But after someone achieved it, the NHL started keeping it as a record.

This isn’t hard to understand, I don’t think.

I'm not saying it's hard to understand. I understand it completely. I just don't agree with it, because it treats different parts of the schedule with different value.

• After Bossy scored his 50th in 1981, his scoring pace fell off dramatically for the rest of the season. 50 goals in his first 50 games, then only 18 in his last 29 games.
• Charlie Simmer scored 49 in 50 to great acclaim, scored his 50th in his next game, then turned around and had a 6-game goalless drought and ended up with 56 on the year.
• Same with Bobby Hull in 1966, scoring 50 in 52 and then finishing the season with 4 goals in his last 13 games.

Why should we give different credit for these streaks than if they were reversed? Why is 50/50 followed by 18/29 held differently than 18/29 followed by 50/50? They literally have the same value. Again it's like having a hat trick in the first period followed by two scoreless periods, versus having two scoreless periods followed by a hat trick. It's the exact same thing. Both are hat tricks and should be recognized as such.

I get what you're saying about it being like a race, but if the purpose is to make a comparison to Maurice Richard, then I would posit that the important part of the comparison is to match Richard's pace over the same period of performance time regardless of where it occurs in a much longer and much more grueling schedule.

Okay? So what?

I don’t even understand your argument at this point. Are you trying to get the NHL to treat 50 in 50 as a record that ignores the point of the season it occurs in? That it expands the official stance on it?

If that happens, wouldn’t there still be a distinction for people who have done it faster? I know doing it in less games would be a thing, but what’s so offensive to you to let the league celebrate reaching 50 goals as early in the season as possible?

Put it like this, if Matthews score his 51st goal in the 50th game, he’d have been miles ahead of the rest of the league and have another 32 games to add to his total.

Scoring his 51st goal in the 69th game, or whatever it was, means that he isn’t as far ahead of 2nd place for the rocket and only has another 13 games to add to his total.

Getting a gpg pace for 50 games is incredibly impressive and worth celebrating and comparing and talking about. It’s damn exciting! But it’s not the same as if we still had 32 games left of the season to play.

Again, we have actually seen players do this (or come extremely close to it) only for their scoring rate to collapse for the rest of the season. As it turns out, simply having a red-hot first 50 games doesn't predict much about the rest of the schedule. Players shouldn't be rewarded for having early hot streaks and ignored for having late ones, or vice versa. Reward the achievement itself, not the timing.

Don't get me wrong -- if you are really just very interested in seeing players have a race to game 50, there's nothing wrong with that. Some people like races, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with tracking "fastest to 50" as a separate statistic. But denying players official recognition of a 50-in-50 just because it didn't take place in a particular segment of the calendar is just wrong.