Gretzky isn't the greatest goal scorer?
- Thread starter squaleca
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GoldenSeal
Believe In The Note
In regards to Gretzky, he's scored the most goals in general, butttt.... he isn't necessarily the guy who's scored the most goals on a given team he's played for outside of Edmonton. For all the years he was in LA, it's Bernie Nicholls that holds that honor for the Kings, not Wayne.
Having the most goals doesn't make you the "Best Goal Scorer". It'd be like saying if Pat Maroon ended up with a dozen Stanley Cups that he's the greatest Stanley Cup Champion, not that I don't love the hell out of some Pat Maroon, cause I do.
Having the most goals doesn't make you the "Best Goal Scorer". It'd be like saying if Pat Maroon ended up with a dozen Stanley Cups that he's the greatest Stanley Cup Champion, not that I don't love the hell out of some Pat Maroon, cause I do.
ScaredStreit
Registered User
Gretzky's main focus wasn't on scoring goals and he still outscored his competition by leaps and bounds. Also I really don't think we can compare Patrick Maroon to Gretzky...I like Maroon and all but that's a huge stretch.
Fourier
Registered User
There is a difference though. When Bernie Nichols scored 70 goals who was the guy feeding him the puck?? I think Gretzky and Robitaille had a huge amount to do with that outlier of a season. When Gretzky scored 92 it was still him driving the bus. It was not because of the extraordinary play making skills of Dave Lumley.
Nicholls was giving the pass to Gretzky's goals just as often as Wayne did his (15/70 vs. 11/54).
Dr Pepper
Registered User
....Wouldn't that still be accurate though?
Far the greatest player ever, obviously, but if he collects the most Cup wins would he by definition be the "greatest Stanley Cup Champion"?
The Panther
Registered User
Gretzky assisted on 30 of Nicholls' 70 goals (43%), while Nicholls assisted on 15 of Gretzky's 54 (28%). Not sure where you're getting your information from.
Regardless, Bernie Nicholls remains one of the most talented offensive players I've seen, to this day. However, his skating was awful, and pre-Jersey, his defensive effort was completely non-existent. Gretzky's arrival both inspired him and did him the favor of leaving the other club's top checkers away from his line.
You're counting secondary assists, which to me does not equal "feeding him the puck".
The Panther
Registered User
By the way, about the 'secondary assists' thing, where do you get the information on this? I've noticed a lot of errors on H0ckey Reference as regards primary and secondary assists, but I'm wondering if the NHL.com site is accurate....
Big Phil
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- Nov 2, 2003
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There are always a couple of schools of thought when it comes to things. Is Ovechkin the greatest pure goal scorer of all-time? Yes. Is he the greatest goal scorer of all-time? Hard to say. Because you have guys like Gretzky and Lemieux who scored goals at will and yet still had those enormous assist totals. In other words, Gretzky was a pass-first guy and yet still led the NHL in goals, to this day. It reminds me a bit of Babe Ruth. He is the greatest home run hitter of all-time, and yet there is so much more to his game. His career batting average is .342, good for 10th all-time, which is insane for numbers for a home run hitter. Only Ted Williams, who hit less home runs and was probably considered to be known as more of a disciplined hitter, is a home run hitter with a higher batting average (.344). Ty Cobb is #1 with .366, so we are talking about Ruth being near that despite doing a lot of swinging for the fences.
So it sort of reminds me of the 5 times Gretzky led the NHL in goals. He did it by insane amounts and yet he had a bigger lead in assists every time. So the question begs, is it more impressive to lead the NHL in goals while not always focusing solely on it, over someone (Ovechkin) who put all of his eggs in one basket and focused a lot on it?
So it sort of reminds me of the 5 times Gretzky led the NHL in goals. He did it by insane amounts and yet he had a bigger lead in assists every time. So the question begs, is it more impressive to lead the NHL in goals while not always focusing solely on it, over someone (Ovechkin) who put all of his eggs in one basket and focused a lot on it?
Fourier
Registered User
I've said this already in this thread but if Gretzky was more of a shoot first guy I have no doubt he would have scored a lot more. As an Oiler he generated an enormous number of two on ones. These would be prime goal scoring opportunities especially for someone as accurate as Gretzky. But his ability to wait until the very last minute to make a pass that gave Kurri or Coffey or whomever an almost unstopable shot was his single most dangerous play. Very early in his career he'd shoot far more often on these sorts of plays than he did as both he and his line mates matured.
Not to derail too much, but Williams' HR total being lower than Ruth is largely due to WWII and Korea taking 5 seasons away from him in his prime. Does he hit 714? Not sure, but he walked as many times as Ruth did in 1000 fewer PAs.
So even there you get a discussion with some big differences, just like Ovy/99. Ruth's pitching is what puts it over the top for me, but hitting, Williams puts a heck of a case up, IMHO.
Gretzky was shooting more than anyone in the league. Sure Kurri and Coffey received plenty of good passes, but also delivered plenty of them, shooting themselves fewer than Wayne.
Fourier
Registered User
Sure. But that does not impact the point of my comment. He gave up a huge number of great scoring chances because by passing someone else got a better one.
Since he came into the league Ovi has the top seven season totals for shots on goal, 8 of the top 10 and 10 of the top 15. Between 84-85 and 95-96 Gretzky's top season for shots was 17th over that period and he had 2 of the top 50 seasons. Over the period of his first 5 years in the league he had the 1st and 3rd highest shot total of any player and only 80-81 was he out of the top 50. There is no question that he changed his focus to more of a pass first game.
By making passes Gretzky also created space for himself, had he been shooting every opportunity then defenses would have started to play it like that too.
Fourier
Registered User
Defenses focused on Gretzky more than any player I have ever seen. By the time they won their first cup he had shaddows following him all over the ice.
Plenty of examples of how defenses played these situations covering the passing lanes:
Big Phil
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- Nov 2, 2003
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That's the idea. In the beginning of the 1985-'86 season he set out a goal of averaging two assists per game, and he did it. And yet still scored 52 goals. That is just utterly unreal. Someone was that good that he could just change how he produces on a whim is just amazing.
That's why when people talk about the greatest hitters of all-time it is always Williams and Ruth.
OK, so the numbers you posted suggest that Gretzky's total shots went down 11% in the last 32 games in 85/86 - while his shooting % went down the whole 30%. If his shooting % was the same in the first 48 and last 32 games, he would be pacing for 61 goals in the first part of the season and 54 goals in the second part, hardly a big difference. With the abysmal shooting %, he was pacing for 38 goals in the second part, and that's how, with some revisionist history, we have the story of Gretzky focusing on the assists (and apparently shooting at the goaltender's belly on purpose).
We do not know about their luck, we do not have Gretzky's on ice shooting %. Probably their luck was average, they just started shooting more for whatever reason (some of them caught fire, their opponents were weak on D, or maybe Gretzky did help them by getting them the puck exactly when they had the open lane).
If his puck luck had been the same in both parts of the season, his goal-scoring rate would have been different by 7 goals per 80, or roughly 3 goals per 32. So he gave up 3 goals. Big freaking deal. That’s all his effort to trade goals for assists was good for.
So there you go, that's how we got the assists record, not by Gretzky willing it to happen and trading goals for assists.
3 extra goals with shooting % held constant, as I explained above. OK, 7 over the whole season.
So imagine Gretzky had sacrificed a dozen assists in his peak goal-scoring years and had gotten 7 extra goals instead. I would not say it would have changed much.
Here are Gretzky's and Oveckin's % leads over #10 in goals
Ovechkin: 63-61-52-52-50-44-43-41-30-26-24-15-6
Gretzky: 85-85-59-48-48-17-15-13-9
Here are Bobby Hull's and Howe's:
G. Howe: 145-105-96-83-58-57-52-46-32-30-29-27-22-19-16-8-4-0
Hull Sr.: 108-93-92-79-71-63-56-47-32-22-19-19-15
Here they are adjusted for the fact that those leads were wider for everyone in the six-team league
G. Howe: 87-63-58-50-35-34-31-28-19-18-16-13-11-10-10
Hull Sr.: 65-56-55-48-42-38-34-28-19-13-12-9
Now, give Gretzky extra 15% in 2-3 years of your choice - will it make a difference?
No, not much. Unadjusted leads of Hull and Howe still blow him out of the water. Their (and Ovechkin's) longevity as a legit goal-scoring title challenger still blow him out of the water.
Once we do the era adjustment for Hull and Howe, we still have the same question comparing Gretzky with Howe, Hull, Ovechkin: are two years of superior peak worth 5-6 extra Rocket-worthy years? You can make Gretzky's peak somewhat more superior, or make his drop-off from the peak somewhat slower by adding those few extra goals he could have scored, but that will not change the overall picture.
Why would he do that if he is going for maximizing his assists? Why take a low-chance shot if you can pass and you are actually looking to pass more?
The whole idea that a person looking to become more of a playmaker will take more low-quality shots and see his shots totals stay almost the same as before, but will see his shooting % drop looks very forced to me.
What a player looking to become more of a playmaker will do is he will not be shooting in cases when the shot has a low chance. Those low-chance shots will be the first ones a playmaker will eliminate in favor of making a pass. So it is the number of shots, not the shooting percentage that should drop if a player switches to more of a playmaker role.
Look at career shooting percentage for guys like Thornton or Oates - is it abysmally low? No, it is quite normal, even though neither had much of a shot. But they tended to use this relatively weak shot of theirs in high-chance situations and pass otherwise, and that's how their shooting % is the same as Ovechkin's, who has a rocket of a shot, but shoots in every situation he can, including some situations in which Thornton would not even think of shooting.
It is shot volume, not shooting percentage that sets Ovechkin and Thornton apart, it is the fact that Ovechkin is dangerous from many more positions that makes Ovechkin a better goal-scorer. And that's how Gretzky becoming more of a playmaker should look like: way less shots, same shooting percentage. And that's how it actually looked like when Gretzky lost his goal-scoring touch in the 90s. But 85/86 was not it.
Oh well, look, we found the 7 extra goals per season Gretzky could have forced to happen instead of assists. Or maybe less, because he was still passing to Coffey when Coffey was in a better position, even in the season when Gretzky scored 87 and 92 goals.
Forsberg's career shooting % in RS with COL is 14.8, in PO 17.4
Assuming his true shooting % is exactly 14.8, on his 334 PO shots with 95% he should have scored between 39 and 60 goals (try binom.inv(334;0.148;0.05) and binom.inv(334;0.148;0.95) in Excel) for shooting % between 11.6% and 17.8%. So yes, it is close, but probably still random variation.
First, their coach and their team would have soon told them to stop.
Second, there are diminishing returns to scale: finding the chance to get the first 10 goals is easy, there are tons of 10-goal players. Finding each next 10 goals is progressively harder, and that's why the number of 30-goal players is much, much smaller, and the number of 40-goal players is another order of magnitude smaller.
Once you get into the stratoshere of being 50% ahead of #10 in goals, you have already used all scoring and shooting chances a human can find. Finding even an extra 5 goals will be a Herculean task, like climbing the last 500 feet to reach the summit of Everest.
And what you are trying to say is basically "I climbed 500-foot hills with ease, get me within 500 feet of Mt. Everest summit, and I will easily cover the rest of the distance". Things do not work this way.
Between 1981 and his departure in 1998, the fraction of Gretzky's goals that were PP goals fluctuated between 19.5% and 25% - and it continued to be in the same range with LAK. One exception was 84/85, when Gretzky’s fraction of PP goals was at 10.5%, but in 85/86 and after this fraction was back to what it was in 81/82. If Gretzky's PP output was dropping in absolute value with time, it was because his total goals also did.
... and player deployment is in turn affected by player talent and ability. It is not like you can have Backstrom fire one-timers instead of Ovechkin and expect the same results.
In fact, even Ovechkin himself needed to develop some extra skills to be as efficient on PP as he was in his post-peak years. In 2012/13, Oates worked with Ovechkin a lot to expand his "wheelhouse" - Oates saw OV's ability to rip off a hard shot while falling, or on his knees, or firing a rolling puck, and made sure that OV uses it on PP to the largest extent possible, basically managing a dangerous shot any time the puck crosses the left circle (even if the pass is bad and the puck is going two feet behind OV).
So any time I hear someone saying that "X could have scored more if he was given as much chances / same role / as much great passes as OV", I want to ask "what has X done to deserve being granted all that?" X could be a great player, as good as Ovechkin and even better (e.g., at the moment) - but is X just as good of a goal-scorer as OV to complain about his team not relying on his goal-scoring as much as Caps rely on OV?
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You seem to be conflating two arguments in your response:
1. Whether Gretzky traded goals for assists
2. Whether it made a big difference
Establishing 2 does not refute 1. I agree with you that many posters exaggerate the difference, and that people incorrect claim that Gretzky's entire goal scoring decline was simply a result of trading goals for assists (his overall effectiveness clearly declined from his peak, and then took a steep drop again after 1991). With Gretzky already being more on the playmaking side of things, it meant that he had less room to move down the goals/assists curve while still being efficient in terms of taking advantage of his scoring chances. We're clearly in agreement that if you're scoring 200+ points, you aren't going to score only, say, 20 goals, because doing that would actually give up so many potential offensive opportunities that you wouldn't hit 200 points in the first place. We're just arguing over how far you can go before it starts hurting you.
I have some degree of confidence about this because I've done some research on goals/assist splits. If you look at top-line calibre offensive players over multiple season samples, virtually everyone scores at least 20% of their even strength points as goals, and at least 35% of their even strength points as assists. The vast majority actually end up more between 25% and 40%, but the first two numbers represent more of the theoretical maximum. I definitely think anybody going below either 20% goals or 35% assists is hurting their overall output for sure, and it's very likely also true that a playmaker type getting near 50% goals or a shoot-first player going below 40% goals is also giving up effectiveness in pursuit of those stats.
Over the final 32 games of 1985-86, 21% of Gretzky's even strength points were goals, which again seems to reflect a scenario of him maximizing his level of assists.
Gretzky Percentage of ESG/ESP:
1982: 46%
1983: 36%
1984: 41%
1985: 37%
1986 (first 48): 30%
1986 (last 32): 21%
1987: 34%
1988: 29%
1989: 38%
At 30% even strength points being goals, which was consistent with Gretzky's first half and his following seasons, he'd have gone from 12 even strength goals in the last 32 games to 17 (difference of 5). If he did 34% for the entire season, he'd have scored 49 goals total (difference of 11). I'd say a reasonable estimate of his even strength tradeoff of goals for assists would be around those benchmarks.
On special teams you will see a greater degree of specialization, so that depends on a player's role. I doubt Gretzky passed up too many power play goals in 1985-86, it looks like he got lucky in the first half and overall ended up coming in very close to what he was producing in terms of power play goals in the surrounding seasons. While shorthanded I think Gretzky definitely gave up goals, based on his G/A split relative to the rest of his career. So my conservative estimate of his overall trade-off in 1985-86 would be about 12 goals (5 ES, 7 PK).
His linemates took more shots, Gretzky got them the puck in the open lane, are you disagreeing with me or agreeing with me that Gretzky was focusing on scoring assists? We don't know their shots, we don't know the shot distribution, we just know that Gretzky recorded relatively more assists and a similar rate of points, which certainly implies that they took more shots or that they finished at a higher rate to compensate for Gretzky's personal stats, thereby balancing out his overall on-ice shooting %. Neither of those two things is inconsistent with Gretzky trying to rack up a lot of assists.
He raised his previous assist record by 28, and averaged over 2 per game, that seems like a pretty good outcome.
Again, I don't buy that his shot distribution was exactly the same, or that the shot distribution of his teammates was exactly the same, which is why I think he gave up more goals than that.
Weakness of opposition has zero impact on Gretzky trading goals for assists. I brought up opposition because you were the one that speculated that Gretzky was at his playmaking peak. I agree Gretzky got the assists record in part because of weak competition, but it was also because he was aiming to score a lot of assists. Both things can be true at the same time.
Without the extra points from playing WPG/LAK/VAN, Gretzky would have ended up around 201 points. Assume he traded 12 goals for assists, take the same goals/assists ratio, and that gives him 60 goals and 141 assists. So I do think that Gretzky's playmaking ability was likely very close to 1984-85 (135 assists), what changed was the weaker competition, his G/A split at ES and on the PK, and a slightly higher individual points percentage on the power play (he was likely fortunate to pick up an extra 4-5 PPA that season, based on his typical rate of points on power play goals while he was on the ice).
I believe my comment referred to "people in this thread", not you specifically. I actually agree that Gretzky's career curve likely doesn't change all that much, and there are other considerations to be accounted for anyway such as era adjustments and factoring in things like deployment, usage and teammates, but a lot of people are looking at raw goal totals, including raw career goal totals. For them, adding an extra bunch of goals matter.
Even some conservative assumption like adding 7 goals to Gretzky in 1985-86 moves him from 6th to 3rd, so that certainly makes a difference for people who simply count goal finishes. If we give him 12 extra goals, then he finishes either first or second to Kurri, depending on how many of Kurri's goals were on extra passes where Gretzky would ordinarily have taken the shot. Again, this doesn't seem unreasonable at all to me considering Gretzky led the league in goals every other season from 1981-82 to 1986-87.
Note that I'm not making a general claim about Gretzky overall, as to whether he could have scored more. I think he definitely could have shot more on the power play, just as a minimum, particularly from 1984-85 to 1990-91 before his overall finishing rate dropped off substantially. Otherwise his ES and PK goal/assist splits were relatively consistent, so they were likely not too far from his optimal distribution. I really doubt he could have, for example, scored more goals than assists at ES without losing overall effectiveness. I just think it's pretty clear that he made some tradeoffs in 1985-86 specifically.
I don't agree that there is a universal rule about how to become more of a playmaker, it depends entirely on the player. Wayne Gretzky had a slapshot that was actually a reasonably dangerous weapon and accounted for a fair number of his goals in the mid-'80s. That is not at all comparable to Thornton or Oates, who would have had the typical playmaker distribution of shots taken relatively close to the net. Watch Gretzky in highlights, he often comes over the blueline, pulls up and cuts across the middle, then uses a fake shot to try to freeze the defence before either changing the angle for a closer shot or setting up a pass. But that decoy doesn't work if you never shoot, so it's just basic game theory that he had to shoot enough to force the defence to continue to respect the shot.
I agree on Thornton and late career Gretzky, but I don't see how you can argue that Oates' shooting percentage dropped when you adjust for era.
| Seasons | G | S | S% | Avg S% | Adj S% |
| 1986-90 | 77 | 593 | 13.0% | 12.3% | 11.4% |
| 1991-94 | 122 | 781 | 15.6% | 11.4% | 14.9% |
| 1995-04 | 142 | 1018 | 13.9% | 9.8% | 15.3% |
SH goals scored by Coffey, assisted by Gretzky:
1982: 0
1983: 0
1984: 0
1985: 2
1986: 9
1987: 0
I don't see much evidence that Gretzky was ever passing routinely to Coffey in PK scenarios, other than during that one season.
Why are you looking at just Colorado? Put in his whole career, and you get a significant result at the 95% level. If you weight his shooting percentage by his playoff games, it probably falls back under the threshold again, but odds are there is something there. Even just as an Av, having watched Forsberg in the playoffs I'd bet that it wasn't random variation, for the same reason that players in their prime tend to increase their shooting percentage with some degree of sustainability.
But again, if you want to see everything as luck and random chance, you can certainly choose to do so. You will avoid making certain errors but will end up making other ones, compared to somebody who adds more of a subjective perspective, that's just the reality of hockey analysis.
I mean, I do agree to some extent that Ovechkin has really optimized goal scoring. I think you can make the case that no player in NHL history has ever been put in a better position to score power play goals than he has since 2012-13. Maybe Mario in some of those years when the Penguins had tons of PPOs and he never left the ice, but either way it's a very short list. My observation is that I don't think most players, even very, very talented goal scorers, ever got similar usage. So I think the analogy is more like Ovechkin getting a guide and a whole team to help him all the way to the top of the mountain, while you're pointing at a guy 80% of the way up the mountain without any entourage whatsoever and saying that there is no way he could have done any better than he did all by himself.
There are tons of examples of player opportunity causing increases or decreases in goals. Brad Marchand was scoring 25 goals a season with 16-17 minutes of ice time and very little PP opportunity, and then he gets bumped up to 19-20 a night and plays on the PP1 and he's averaged 39 goals per 82 games ever since. Sure looks like for him it was extremely easy to find an extra 15 goals, even at an age where we wouldn't expect that much improvement, because sometimes opportunity and player roles are the limiting factor, not player talent or individual decision-making.
It seems we have very different views of how hockey works. I don't think goals are a completely separate statistical category at all, as if they were something like doubles or stolen bases in baseball. In my view, players do a variety of things on the ice to help their teams, e.g. covering defensively, takeaways, puck recoveries, zone exits, zone entries, passing to teammates in transition and in the offensive zone, and shooting the puck. All these lead to some number of scoring chances, which are distributed based on the types of players on the ice, and players end up scoring points within some typical boundaries depending on whether they are relatively more skilled at playmaking or finishing.
The reason that the number of 40 goal scorers is small is that the number of players good enough to create enough offensive opportunities that they end up with 70+ points is relatively small, and within that group there is a range of skillsets from extreme pass-first bias to extreme shoot-first bias, as well as players deployed in a variety of different ways, at even strength and on the power play. The pool of 40 goal scorers is made up of a few 70 point players with elite finishing skills, likely mostly 80-90 point players with a more balanced game, and a few 100+ point playmakers who chip in goals in between assists.
You take a passer and put him with a shooter, and their goals and assists split might get more extreme as they both specialize. But then you take that shooter off the line and put in another passer, and that doesn't mean those goals disappear in smoke, the players simply adjust to the new scenario and likely both score slightly more goals. That's why I think players are best evaluated by their overall point total, and that it is a mistake to view goals and assists as separate items entirely.
Do you honestly think that the Edmonton power play couldn't handle Wayne Gretzky taking more shots, or that the guy leading the league in goals in 1986-87 had somehow lost the ability to score in the easiest possible game state in which to do so?
There's definitely no rule that a player's percentage of PP goals has to be consistent with their overall goal scoring.
Here's Mike Bossy, who had his PP goal scoring drop as his ES scoring increased:
| Year | GP | ESG | PPG | PPA |
| 1978 | 73 | 28 | 25 | 15 |
| 1979 | 80 | 42 | 27 | 23 |
| 1980 | 75 | 36 | 15 | 16 |
| 1981 | 79 | 38 | 28 | 16 |
| 1982 | 80 | 47 | 17 | 30 |
| 1983 | 79 | 41 | 19 | 21 |
| 1984 | 67 | 45 | 6 | 22 |
| 1985 | 76 | 40 | 14 | 14 |
| 1986 | 80 | 39 | 21 | 18 |
| 1987 | 63 | 29 | 8 | 23 |
| Year | GP | ESG | PPG | PPA |
| 1960 | 70 | 33 | 6 | 6 |
| 1961 | 67 | 26 | 5 | 8 |
| 1962 | 70 | 41 | 9 | 10 |
| 1963 | 65 | 23 | 8 | 8 |
| 1964 | 70 | 27 | 12 | 20 |
| 1965 | 61 | 27 | 10 | 5 |
| 1966 | 65 | 31 | 22 | 19 |
| 1967 | 66 | 32 | 18 | 5 |
| 1968 | 71 | 34 | 8 | 8 |
| 1969 | 74 | 36 | 20 | 16 |
| 1970 | 61 | 26 | 10 | 11 |
| 1971 | 78 | 33 | 11 | 21 |
| 1972 | 78 | 39 | 8 | 15 |
I agree it is affected by player talent and ability. Just like how if the Caps traded Backstrom tomorrow for a guy who is a better shooter and not such a playmaker, then they probably tinker with their setup to create more of a shooting threat from the left side of the ice and Ovechkin likely ends up getting more PP assists and fewer PP goals. Yet that wouldn't make him a worse goal scorer. Everything is interrelated to some degree.
Sure, every player has to adapt as their careers go on. I don't buy that his individual improvement had even remotely as significant an impact as the team systems change.
What did Ovechkin do to deserve having Adam Oates get hired as his coach? It is absurd to assume that every player in the NHL is used optimally on the power play, when evidence suggests Ovechkin himself was clearly not used optimally himself in the same situation until 2012-13.
Look at Bossy and Hull, who are obviously elite goal scorers. Did Mike Bossy "deserve" to score only 6 power play goals in 1983-84? Do you think that reflects his actual goal-scoring talent? Not only did Bossy rack up 22 assists, but he was only on the ice for 35 of the Islanders' 63 PP goals that year, as the team spread the ice time around likely to keep everyone challenged through a relatively meaningless regular season while the team was really just waiting for the playoffs and the Drive for Five. Those are the kinds of things that teams have done throughout history, especially before things like analytics and video scouting and probably even dedicated power play coaches. That is also why I think the question of the GOAT goal scorer is a little more complicated than goals scored vs. #10.
Do you think Ovechkin has the potential to rack up more power play assists, if Washington decided to change their power play set up? Then you should understand why Wayne Gretzky could easily have scored more power play goals in those years where he was leading the league in both even strength and shorthanded goals. That doesn't mean I necessarily even think Gretzky is a better goal scorer than Ovechkin, but I think it's very obvious that he was a versatile enough offensive player that he could have successfully carried out a number of roles, including ones that resulted in him taking significantly more shots with the man advantage.
Fourier
Registered User
This thread is a numbers thread admittedly. But if numbers are telling you that Gretzky's goal scoring ability declined, or that any of his skills declined between 84-85 and say 89-90, thenthose numbers are painting a false picture.
ChuckLefley
Registered User
- Jan 5, 2016
- 1,665
- 1,038
I’ll point out a couple of things in response to some posts:
1) Gretzky only led the league in shots four times.
2) Gretzky had a fantastic shooting percentage of 20.9% in Edmonton.
3) Gretzky scored that many goals while acknowledging that he had been trying to do things like average 2 assists per game. He was focusing on assists while scoring 50,60,70 and 80 goals!
1) Gretzky only led the league in shots four times.
2) Gretzky had a fantastic shooting percentage of 20.9% in Edmonton.
3) Gretzky scored that many goals while acknowledging that he had been trying to do things like average 2 assists per game. He was focusing on assists while scoring 50,60,70 and 80 goals!
I don't think you can claim to focus on assists while shooting career high years and more than anyone else in the league.
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