But there is a need for a facetious response, because I said a few players and you quoted me a reply saying the "entire" league. I can leave out the facetiousness, if you can leave out the hyperbole.
To the topic...long post and I will not be adding a TL;DR because it's mostly stats. Remove McDavid if you are going to average stats, otherwise you taint the average with the comparative value.
It is plain and simple, McDavid did not have a more impressive Art Ross win than the previous year which brings into question the claim that he was better. Maybe it was team dynamics that held him back but the great players before him don't have that excuse; they are measured by what they accomplished.
False. This thread is one example. There are Lemieux supporters who cite his weak 80's teams as the reason he did not produce nearly as well as Gretzky when comparing their early career. The fact of the matter is, 99 was just better.
https://hfboards.mandatory.com/thre...-lemieux-crosby-malkin-francis.2531535/page-5
Post 107 for a direct reference.
No need for the facetious response. It is a statistical fact that scoring was up among the elite offensive forwards this past year.
# of players over 90 points
16/17 - - 1
17/18 - 9
# of players over 80 points
16/17 - 7
17/18 - 21
# of players at a PPG or better in Top 50
16/17 - 8
17/18 - 20
Avg. PPG of the Top 20 scorers
16/17 - 0.99
17/18 - 1.13
Comparison here doesn't make sense IMO, using two different sample sizes (20 and 50). Going to stick with top 20 to keep it in line with average you made and the stats I posted above with scoring finish comparisons. It doesn't change the overall numbers other than you are digging into players that score 65pts in 60 games etc, room for too much variance. Once again, I removed McDavid from the calculations (numbers remain close to similar, /19 instead of 20).
AVG PPG (top20):
2016-17:
0.981
2017-18:
1.126
Number of players ppg+ in top 20:
2016-17:
7 (McDavid makes 8)
2017-18:
19 (McDavid makes 20)
Leads over 10th and 20th:
Points:
16-17 - 25p (Tarasenko) & 31p (Matthews)
17-18 - 19p (Crosby) & 26p (Panarin)
PPG:
16-17 - 0.305 (Tarasenko) & 0.379 (Matthews)
17-18 - 0.232 (Crosby) & 0.305 (Panarin)
The PPG difference here is fairly even between the 10th and 20th place scorer's for each season and the points totals are dead even with gap reducing by 5 points for each of the scoring placements. The primary difference for the average PPG increase is because everyone in the top 20 was suddenly above 1. The math below shows us that 6 of those people were setting astronomically high career years, and one more was a rookie. so 7 out of the 20 have what I would consider to be difficult to sustain numbers going into this year. You could make a case for a couple of them, but we won't know until they do or die this year:
There were 4 players (Kucherov, Marchand, Crosby, and Malkin) who were above PPG in both years, so they are fairly consistent. There were 7 players who made the top 20 in scoring each year (The four guys mentioned, along with - Kessel, Wheeler, and Panarin), these are guys were kind of expect.
So the non-outliers for the two years are McDavid, Panarin, Kessel, Crosby, Malkin, Wheeler, Marchand, and Kucherov (because they repeated being top-20 scorer's). Analyzing for possible outliers in the remaining 12 players that showed up in 2017-18 who weren't there in 2016-17.
Using past three years - Points (PPG) - in order from 2015-16/2016-7/2017-18:
| 15-16 | 16-17 | 17-18 | AVG Points | AVG PPG | P > AVG | PPG > AVG |
| Giroux | 67 (0.859) | 58 (0.707) | 102 (1.244) | 75.67 | 0.937 | 34.80% | 32.76% |
| MacKinnon | 52 (0.722) | 53 (0.646) | 97 (1.311) | 67.33 | 0.893 | 44.07% | 46.81% |
| Hall | 65 (0.793) | 53 (0.736) | 93 (1.224) | 70.33 | 0.918 | 32.23% | 33.33% |
| Kopitar | 74 (0.914) | 52 (0.684) | 92 (1.122) | 72.67 | 0.907 | 26.60% | 23.70% |
| Ovechkin | 71 (0.899) | 69 (0.841) | 87 (1.061) | 75.67 | 0.934 | 14.58% | 13.60% |
| Barzal | N/A | N/A | 85 (1.037) | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Stamkos | 64 (0.831) | N/A | 86 (1.103) | 75 (2YR) | 0.967 | 14.67% | 14.06% |
| Voracek | 55 (0.752) | 61 (0.744) | 85 (1.067) | 67 | 0.854 | 26.87% | 24.94% |
| Tavares | 70 (0.897) | 66 (0.857) | 84 (1.024) | 73.33 | 0.926 | 14.55% | 15.23% |
| Rantanen | N/A | 38 (0.507) | 85 (1.037) | 61.5 | 0.772 | 38.21% | 36.01% |
| Gaudreau | 78 (0.987) | 61 (0.847) | 84 (1.050) | 74.33 | 0.901 | 13.01% | 16.54% |
| Kuznetsov | 77 (0.939) | 59 (0.720) | 83 (1.051) | 73 | 0.903 | 13.70% | 16.39% |
| McDavid | N/A | 100 (1.220) | 108 (1.317) | 104 | 1.2685 | 2.52% | 3.85% |
[TBODY]
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*NOTE - the last two columns are their current year points/PPG beyond their 2 or 3 year average points/PPG
Omitted McDavid's first year for the same reason I omitted Stamkos' second year. Half the season is not really worth comparing and there is no real reason to compare Barzal since he only had one year. There is some notable players in the top 20, like Kuznetsov, Stamkos, Gaudreau, OV. Mackinnon and Rant had great chemistry last year, but I look at some of the numbers for these players and you're comparing guys who had more than a 30% increase to their PPG/points over their average.
To me it is impressive that not only can McDavid stay ahead of the consistent stars - Kucherov, Crosby, Malkin, Marchand - who have been up there in back to back years, but he can also stay ahead of people putting up and additional 30% over their average production...this is how you stave off the Jamie Benn's from winning Art Ross'
Did his PPG increase slightly less than the avg increase in PPG, Yes. McDavid's PPG increased by 0.097 (up from 1.220). The average PPG for the top 20 scorers went up by 0.145. This results in a difference of - 0.048PPG or 3.936 points over 82 games... McDavid increased his EV scoring by 18.3%, his goal scoring by 36.67%. He has a shown a clear trend in increasing his PPG over 3 years (keeping in mind that the first year was 40ish games). Where has half of the above list shown that trend?
But you want us to believe that while McDavid was better in 17/18 because he scored more points, every other elite forward in the Top 50 who scored more (which would be the vast majority of the Top 50) simply had an unusually productive season which explains why McDavid did not have a more impressive Art Ross win than the year before.
That is not reasonable.
The top 50 is irrelevant to me because it includes people like Perron (60 in 70), Schwartz (59 in 62), Reilly Smith (60 in 67), Boeser (55 in 62), Scheifele (60 in 60, top-20 in 16-17), Getzlaf (top-20 in 16-17), Forsberg, Eichel, and the list goes on of players very close to PPG that played less than 70 games. I have no doubt these guys are great players and will have the lions share of 80 point seasons, but there is a massive difference between an 80-90 point season and a +100 point season. It's much easier to go from 0.700-0.800PPG to 1.000PPG than it is to go from 1.200PPG to 1.300PPG.
I believe you are putting too much stock in a difference of 0.048PPG (McDavid's PPG increase vs the average increase of the top 20 scorers). Not to mention Crosby would likely have been above 90pts last year, increasing the number of players from 1 to 2. 100pts was the new 90 points....
I've just shown you 6/12 scorers who weren't top 20 in either of the previous two years, having boosted their average production by more than 20%, with a few recording massive career years. Obviously this skews the PPG for the rest of that group...I'm unsure how this makes McDavid's Art Ross victory less impressive.
