Lol...and Matthews played in an inferior, higher scoring league to Laine yet Leafs fans continually talk about how Matthews is more offensively talented and "out produced" Laine last season.
The problem with sarcastically dismissing Matthews "outscoring Laine in an inferior league" is that it completely diminishes the actual massive difference in Matthews' domination and scoring versus Laine's.
Yes, the NLA is inferior to an extent. However, it's not beer league vs NHL like some posters would like to make it seem.
But more importantly, in this "inferior" league, Matthews didn't just put up a few more points than Laine or score 2-3 more goals. He dominated at a level several tiers above Laine.
Laine put up
0.72 PPG (0.75 w/playoffs) &
0.37GPG (0.42 w/playoffs) in the FEL last year.
Laine finished
~23rd in PPG during the regular season if you remove players with small sample sizes (also, Eliteprospects doesn't have aggregate rankings based on regular season + playoffs, so I can only use regular season now)
Matthews put up
1.28 PPG (1.23 w/playoffs) &
0.67GPG (0.60 w/playoffs)
Matthews finished
4th in PPG during the regular season (again, EP doesn't combine reg + playoffs).
When you actually lay it out like that and try to step back and look at it objectively, Matthews didn't just marginally outproduce Laine last year.
He outproduced Laine in both points and goals by several orders of magnitude all while playing the more difficult position.
Again, yes, the NLA is inferior. But it's not so vastly inferior. It's not 3-4 tiers below the FEL. It's not roughly 40% worse than the FEL...which is how Laine's #s stack up to Matthews'.
Roughly 40% worse. That's without mentioning each players finish relative to the top of their league (
4th vs 23rd).
So, maybe if Matthews only put up slightly better numbers and finished somewhere in the 15-20 range for scorers in the NLA we could dismiss all of the arguments about scoring that support Matthews.
Unfortunately (for the haters) that wasn't the case. Matthews absolutely dominated the NLA while being on foreign ice and in a foreign country and playing a harder position. Laine did great things at home, where he grew up, and while only being a winger.
This debate got to where it is because of a couple of tournaments where Laine's
team was far superior to Matthews' and because
every single year the media loves to build up a fight for #1 overall even if there really shouldn't be one. It even happened with the McEichel draft. The one draft where #1 couldn't be any clearer yet we still had some "pros/scouts" saying they "prefer" Eichel.
The difference in choice this year was never about a C vs a W. If Laine was clearly better and a "generational scorer" (like most Laine fans here claim--not just a small minority) then he would have gotten more than ~15% of scouts/execs voting for him as #1. Just look at the 2004 draft for evidence of a "generational" scoring winger being picked over an absolutely phenomenal center prospect. Positional bias had no effect on the outcome because Ovi truly was one of a kind. Laine is not. That's the simple fact of the matter and is no way a slight against Laine. Ovi was/is just that good (easily top 3 goal scorer in history, maybe #1--if you believe in era adjusted data).
The sooner people accept these truths, the sooner we can stop rehashing the same idiotic arguments over and over.