Debunking the narrative that Lemieux's 1988-89 season was powerplay driven

[authentic]

I know in Gretzky's book at one point he tries to be humble about how he (and maybe Lemieux too? It has been a while) was scoring twice as much as everyone else, and he said it was because he played twice as much as everyone else too. I'm sure it was an exaggeration and he was being modest but he did play a lot.

Gretzky, Lemieux, and Yzerman were all double/triple shifted quite a bit during some of their huge seasons from what I recall. What that average TOI ends up being I don't know but I think that 29-30 is not out of the question.

I don't recall ever watching a game at their peaks where it felt like they were on the ice for half the game. I mean you can go back and watch some and you'll clearly see they weren't playing this much.

 

[Golden_Jet]

Too long to read. A lot of ifs , ands and buts though.

 

[TheStatican]

Too long to read. A lot of ifs , ands and buts thought.

It's simple; more special team ice time means less even strength ice time. I'm sure this is generally understood by most hockey fans but in case there was any doubt this has been corroborated by the actual ice times of thousands of player seasons over the last 25 years.

1. The number of powerplay points he loses if his team had the average number of powerplays is 12.5 so 12 or 13.

2. If Lemieux's scoring was at the same level as your average star player he replaces around half of those points at even strength, meaning his point totals drop by 6 points to 193.

3. If Lemieux only scored at a similar rate as other star players at even strength(i.e. half as much as on the powerplay) then he would've had to play about 32 minutes a game in order to score 102 ES points in 76 games. Therefore his ES scoring rate was closer to his PP scoring rate than average. This should not be surprising since he scored 102 ES points in a season with a very high number of powerplays. This means he would make up more than half those lost PP points at ES, closer to 8 or 9 and therefor would've had 3 or 4 points less overall.

4. Lemieux played a huge number of minutes on the penalty kill this season because the Penguins also received a much higher number of penalties than average, essentially an equal amount as PPO's. People always bring up his higher powerplay ice tiem but strangely ignore his shorthanded ice time. His scoring rate while shorthanded was obviously much lower than his ES scoring rate. Depending on what his PK ice time was he would've gained somewhere around 3 to 5 points had played that extra PK time at ES instead. If you want to ignore point 3 entirely he ends up 'losing' 1 to 3 points giving him a total around 196 to 198 when factoring both reduced powerplay and shorthanded time to the league averages. Including point 3 the difference is Nil.

None of the above is suggesting anything outside of generally accepted hockey norms.