(I wrote and posted this yesterday, but deleted it. Maybe the league comparisons deserves its own thread? Anyway, since it continues in this thread, I post this as yet another angle of looking at things.)
Scoring finishes: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5(74%GP). The season finishing 5th he was actually 1st in pts per game.
Leading the scoring 6-7 times, and being top-4-5 all 13 seasons is pretty impressive, right?
Above are the stats of
Patrick Kane, focusing on
only USA players.
Source, for example:
American NHL Players ‑ 2017-2018 Stats
(If some American player is registered as some other nationality than USA, let me know.)
Best scoring finishes by Kane in the NHL as a whole is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9.
Scoring finishes compared to Canadians: 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 11, 13, 13, 14, 19, 19, 24. (He would have been 4th-5th the season he missed games, but here I listed his actual scoring finish of that season.)
Also one each of Hart, Pearson, Smythe.
3 AST-1 and 1 AST-2.
So... If Kane had been playing in a USA players only league, he might have had a very impressive collection of scoring finishes..? But in the NHL, he factually had the finishes mentioned in the previous paragraph.
How comparable is USA elite and depth since 2007-08 relative to the Canada or NHL, compared to the Soviet League of Makarov's day relative to Canada or the NHL of that time?
And can we really draw any conclusions based on this? (In my opinon we can't say much.)
How good do we consider Kane to be compared to Makarov? According to the best-player projects that some participated in, Makarov (26th) is ranked far above Kane (93rd). I don't follow today's NHL much, but from what I've seen of Kane Makarov seemed like a much better overall, allround player than Kane?
This became very theoretical and experimental, but I just got curious in looking at it this way, and thought I might as well share it here. I guess we just cannot draw any conclusions about Makarov. Perhaps we can guess that he at least likely would have been able to outperform Kane (?), although perhaps missing out on a top-1-2 scoring finish mainly because of Gretzky.
Makarov was widely regarded as the 2nd or 3rd best forward of the 1980s. He was likely the best winger.
I have little idea of where Kane would rank during the last decade or so..?
Edit: Somehow I'm not even sure why strength of the Soviet League would matter. Kopitar likely would have been outstanding season after season in a Slovenian league, although that would in itself tell very little about how good he would perform in the NHL.