@Zuluss, before I reply I'm just going to say that I agree with your overall point that goal scorers should be rated based on how good they are as goal scorers, not as overall players. I don't object at all to someone ranking Ovechkin over Gretzky, I am actually in the very extreme minority who ranks Bossy ahead of Gretzky as a goal scorer, because I think there is more to consider than just who ended up on the scoresheet the most times.
That said, here's why I disagree with many of your arguments involving Gretzky in this thread:
I personally do not buy the notion that players can willingly forego goals in favor of assists or the other way around, let alone the notion that they can swap them one-for-one.
As I have already written, the numbers just do not bear out the story "in 85/86, Gretzky decided to take less shots and be more of a playmaker" - he actually took as many shots in 85/86 as the season before, they were just not going in.
Who said Gretzky decided to take less shots? That's not required to support the claim that Gretzky tried to score more assists. What happened in 1985-86, based on statistical evidence and contemporary accounts, is that Gretzky tried to break the assists record (and specifically target 2 assists per game). I'm not sure he decided that from day one, he may well have gotten off to a decent start and started really focusing on it around the halfway point. I really don't see any way to interpret his numbers otherwise:
All numbers per-80 games for easy comparison:
| Season | ESG | ESA | ESP | PPG | PPA | PPP | SHG | SHA | SHP | Shots |
| 1984-85 | 54 | 92 | 146 | 8 | 36 | 44 | 11 | 7 | 18 | 354 |
| First 48 GP in 85-86 | 43 | 98 | 141 | 15 | 43 | 58 | 3 | 13 | 16 | 367 |
| Last 32 GP in 85-86 | 30 | 115 | 145 | 5 | 43 | 48 | 3 | 18 | 20 | 325 |
[TBODY]
[/TBODY]
You're trying to argue that Gretzky got unlucky in terms of his shooting for nearly half a season, at the same time that
every single one of his linemates got lucky by almost exactly the same margin, balancing out his points almost perfectly, and you're claiming that is actually more likely than that the greatest playmaker of all-time explicitly tried to target a record in his best statistical category, during a bunch of meaningless games in a season where his team won the division by 30 points.
I think Gretzky in 1985-86 is easily one of the clearest examples of a player trading goals for assists ever, because down the stretch his goals dropped by a decent margin while his point scoring rates remained almost identical to the previous season, in all 3 game states. I agree that people often see too much meaning in randomness, but here I think you're making the opposite mistake of missing what was actually happening because you've already written it off as luck.
A more plausible story is that his goalscoring and playmaking peaked at different time, and in 85/86 his playmaking was still on the rise, while the strength and precision of his shot were already going down, and Gretzky adjusted actually in 86/87, when he realized from his 85/86 experience that the shots that used to go in for him are not going in any more and hence he started shooting less.
Gretzky wasn't at any kind of peak in 1985-86, the only reason that season became record-breaking points-wise was because he had three sub-60 point teams in his division that he completely beat up on (74 points in 24 games against L.A., Vancouver and Winnipeg).
Also the Oilers, after being famously upset in the 1986 playoffs, changed their style of play to be less high event in 1986-87:
1986: 2645 SF, 2778 SA, 2484 Avg
1987: 2357 SF, 2366 SA, 2400 Avg
Gretzky's shots were down in 1987, but percentage-wise they were down less than it looks (13.2% of team shots to 12.2% of team shots). Not everything is determined entirely by the preferences and choices of individual players, there are coaches and teammates and other teams in the picture as well.
As for "concentrating on goal-scoring" - I think Gretzky took all quality shots he could, and if he had ever tried to shoot even more, that would have been low-quality shots which would not have done him much good.
What do you mean by less good? Even if it cost him a bunch of points overall but resulted in a few more goals, that would have certainly done him more good with the people in this thread who think that goals scored = goal scoring ability, end of argument.
But right here you just described the most likely scenario for Gretzky in 1985-86 that fits all the facts: He took relatively more shots from less dangerous spots and made relatively more passes in dangerous spots.
We obviously don't have expected goal or scoring chance data from that era, but let's take Gretzky's shorthanded scoring, since shorthanded goals tend to be the result of relatively high danger chances, often on the rush. In his career through 1984-85, he had 40 shorthanded goals and 28 shorthanded assists. In 1985-86, he had 3 shorthanded goals and 18 shorthanded assists. Over the rest of his career, he had 30 SHG and 33 SHA.
Not only did Gretzky suddenly have a crazy pass split on the PK, but 8 of his shorthanded assists were on passes to Paul Coffey, and 5 of those 8 came in February or later.
You can call that luck, but then I think your definition of luck is completely broken. When you're breaking in on a shorthanded rush and your first thought is to pass it to a defenceman, you very obviously have an extreme pass-first bias.
More generally, I do not believe that "focusing more on goals" would have done Gretzky or even Howe much good, for the reasons I explained above. Yes, they may have picked up a few extra goals here and there, but it would not have changed the big picture. Every time someone suggests an example of a player "deciding to score more/less goals", a closer look at the data just reveals an unusual shooting percentage.
That's certainly a presumptuous statement to make when we're comparing players over the entirety of hockey history. I doubt you have nearly enough evidence to conclude that nobody has ever increased the quality of their scoring chances enough to support increased goals production from a similar rate of shots. Particularly in an era like the '80s, where there were huge differences in finishing skill and shot quality allowed between teams.
If you look at something like Peter Forsberg scoring goals at a higher rate in the playoffs than in the regular season (one of the classic "he decided to score more" examples), it is in fact based mostly on an increase in shooting percentage, but that increase took place over the course of 151 career playoff games. It's still not impossible that it was largely random, but at the same time, the bigger the sample, the less likely that it is all luck. Playoff samples are small, player peaks are short, it is possible to handwave away every result like that as all luck but I am not convinced that is the responsible statistical choice.
I actually do agree that having an extreme shoot-first or pass-first bias would likely have reduced the overall point totals for many players, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't get more of the goals or assists they were specifically targeting. You can get more goals or assists (or less goals and/or assists) simply by switching spots on the power play, changing lines, getting traded to a weaker division, it's really not that hard. For example, every time a forward was used on the point with the man advantage, their shot distribution changed immediately. You can look at the result of that and call it "an unusual shooting percentage", and that isn't technically wrong, but there was still a non-random reason for it happening.
I don't know, I don't have the PP TOI and shots data for the 84/85. It may well be that Gretzky's PP shooting % was just very low that particular season.
In general, over his career Gretzky was not a PP goal-scorer, which could be due to the fact that he did not have Ovechkin/Stamkos shot "you know it is coming, but you still cannot stop it". So if Gretzky did not take as many PP shots, it was probably for a reason related to his abilities as a goalscorer.
So, let's see, Gretzky scores 56 power play goals in 234 games from 1982-1984 (0.24 per game). He then doesn't score above 0.16 PPG per game in
any one of the following nine seasons (never once finishing in the top 10 in the league in that category, even though 5 times he still ends up top-5 in ES goals). Your conclusion to this is that he may have had a weird shooting percentage year in 1984-85, not that he had a significant change to his power play role that persisted with a high degree of consistency for the next decade?
It was almost definitely because Gretzky was such a good passer that he got moved to a predominantly passing role, rather than a shooting role. Just like how in the 1987 Canada Cup, Gretzky became the passer and Lemieux became the shooter. Having Lemieux passing and Gretzky shooting would certainly still have resulted in a lot of goals, just not as many as vice versa, and therefore that's what they ended up going with. This is the principle of relative advantage, which means that you should be used in the way that you are most effective, and if his team had other guys who could shoot but nobody who could pass like Gretzky, it made sense for him to shift more towards playmaking.
For more or less exactly the same reasons, Alex Ovechkin has only 48 power play assists in his last 409 games.
Honestly, every time I hear someone arguing in favour of Ovechkin try to claim that power play performance reflects only player talent and no other factors whatsoever, it boggles my mind. Was it that long ago that Adam Oates showed up and made the Washington power play the best in the league overnight? Or do you think Ovi suddenly figured out how to take one-timers at age 27, and that was why his power play goals per game rate went up by 35% in 2013-15 compared to absolute peak, force-of-nature Ovi from 2008-10? At the same time that league power play opportunities dropped by 21%?
Ovechkin's post-prime career is one of the clearest examples in hockey history of the obvious fact that power play production is affected by systems and player deployment.
Sure. They get the extra reward for their playmaking when we evaluate them as players overall. Why double-dip and try to use the same assists they already got credit for in overall/playmakers ranking in a goal-scoring discussion? One can be a better goal-scorer and a worse overall player. Probably statements like "Ovechkin is a better goal-scorer than Gretzky" or "Bondra was a better goal-scorer than Kane" just rub people the wrong way, because "Ovechkin better than Gretzky" and "Bondra better than Kane" does sound weird. But it is quite possible for a better player to be worse in one particular thing than a worse player.
Now this I completely I agree with, there should be something of a separation between a player's ability as an overall offensive player and as a goal scorer. Goals and assists aren't unrelated random events, nobody scores 5 goals and 75 assists, or has 80 goals and 10 assists. If you're a great playmaker, you are going to score a bunch of goals, more or less because that is basically how hockey works. It's not obvious to me that necessarily makes you a great goal scorer, if it is in many ways the side-effect of other skills.
But above all, I strongly disagree with the idea that most goals = best goal scorer. There have to be other variables that are relevant when we're comparing different players from different eras on different teams taking on different player roles.
