Ted Leonsis: We will do everything to help Ovi to beat Gretzky's goals record

AWSAA

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Sep 8, 2003
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What are you guys talking about that it was "embarrassing" for Gretzky to play in a higher scoring era?
Sure he did, but he still destroyed his competition in that era. A prime Gretzky today would destroy the league today as well.

Gretz wouldn't win multiple rockets in the modern era...possibly not even 1. No chance going up head 2 head with Ovi.

He'd rack up assists to be sure, but he's not scoring 50+ regularly.
 

Nasti

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But they don't count the same today, there are levels to this. The far more absurd notion is taking stats from a game that isn't reality anymore and comparing them to a much more difficult one and saying that's the mark to beat as if modern players can't measure up. I'm not claiming Ovechkin would have 1000 goals but to state he wouldn't' have more is just a little naive. He's bigger, stronger, faster and has a better shot than anyone left in the upper echelon of scoring goals. Ovi isn't a product of modern training either for the most part, he's just a large man, his body isn't a specimen but he's extremely durable and guys were shooting cannons with wood sticks, yes the wrister wouldn't fly off the stick as well but against that goaltending it wouldn't have to.

Only in the NHL do we hold onto nostalgia this tightly and it's banana lands. Also, I'm 42 and was born in Brantford which is Gretzky's hometown, I'm as big of a fan of the man as there is but he isn't getting those goals in the modern era of hockey and at the very least we have to adjust for era.

And you don’t think that has anything to do with the era he plays in with the training, diet, and equipment being vastly superior today? You think he’d be all those things if he played in the 80’s? We’re going to have to agree to disagree. This isn’t a nostalgia thing. I’m in your age group and most of my life has been post 80’s. And I’ll add there is just as much recency bias on this site as nostalgia bias.
 

Nasti

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Have you seen the old hockey highlights and terrible the goalies and defense were? Some Gretzky's goals wouldn't have gone in if goalies were actually competent. A lot of his goals, in the end, aren't that impressive. It was incredibly easy to score back then. Yeah, those accomplishments aren't as significant. Hockey is a lot harder to play nowadays due to all those reasons you mentioned and more.

Ease is relative. That’s why comparing players to their peers has more value than comparing to players from different eras.
 

JasonRoseEh

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And you don’t think that has anything to do with the era he plays in with the training, diet, and equipment being vastly superior today? You think he’d be all those things if he played in the 80’s? We’re going to have to agree to disagree. This isn’t a nostalgia thing. I’m in your age group and most of my life has been post 80’s. And I’ll add there is just as much recency bias on this site as nostalgia bias.
Unequivocally.
 

Saitama

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Casual hockey fans will love this. Let's put one player ahead of team success. Yee haw.
Yeah, some guy on your team scoring a boatload of goals is definitely going to lead the downfall of the team! There's no way they could possibly win games with a guy that's scoring a lot!
 
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Iapyi

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Yeah, some guy on your team scoring a boatload of goals is definitely going to lead the downfall of the team! There's no way they could possibly win games with a guy that's scoring a lot!

The first six words of my post you quoted is the correct answer.
 

Kaner9

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I dunno... feel like you do that if you own the caps but don't tell everybody and kinda cheapen it... right? :help:
 

The Panther

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I think it's a fact that Gretzky competed against many scrubs who would have no chance at making today's NHL. Maybe they make the the AHL, KHL, SHL, Liiga, or some other professional league. It simply stands to reason that as the talent pool expands, the cutoff is reduced to a more exclusive portion of athletes.
First of all, the NHL was a big-money, professional major league throughout Gretzky's career. Age 21, he was Sportsman of the Year in Sports Illustrated, was feted by Hollywood stars, invited onto The Tonight Show. Yes, the bottom-end of the talent-pool was lesser up to the early-80s than in later periods, but by the mid- and late-80s it was the same as today, and Gretzky dominated as much in 1991 as in 1981.

Your "stands to reason" statement doesn't stand to reason because the "cut off" you refer to is blindly ignoring League expansion, which was entirely after Gretzky's prime. Up to 1981-82, NHL clubs had two (or three? I forget) fewer roster spots than clubs today, and there were 21 teams, not 32. There were still 21 teams in the very early-90s (the best period in NHL history, in my opinion) and about 24 by the mid-90s (also a great period). Anyway, 21 teams was the number throughout Gretzky's prime, and that means a League with 250 fewer jobs available to players than today -- Gretzky's NHL was 30% smaller than today.
This is also consistent with the eye test: Gretzky and Orr skated circles around guys who would look wildly out of place in today's NHL.
I can't really speak to Orr, but here are players Gretzky had no trouble dominating in his prime:
Ray Bourque
Scott Stevens
Chris Chelios
Igor Larianov
Viacheslav Fetisov
Peter Stastny
Mark Howe
Larry Robinson

And when he was well past his prime and on bad teams, he still did well against:
Nick Lidstrom
Zdeno Chara
Etc.

I agree that circa 1979 to 1982 -- early in Wayne's career -- the bottom-end players on bad teams like Vancouver, Toronto, New Jersey, Hartford, etc. were of a lower quality than would be found today. But the NHL of the late-80s was completely different to the NHL of the very early-80s, and Gretzky dominated both, as well as the early 90s. And he was highest-scoring North American player in 1998, twenty years after his pro-career started. (Orr's era is harder to get a handle on, as he did play 1/2 his games against expansion teams. But Gretzky didn't -- the NHL he entered was a contraction, not an expansion, and there was no expansion during his prime years.)

This pattern plays out throughout history -- it doesn't matter how low-end or high-end the competition gets; the elite players are always elite:
- Gordie Howe: 95 points in 70 games in 1953-53; 103 points in 76 games in 1968-69
- Mario Lemieux: 100 points in 73 games in 1984-85; 91 points in 67 games in 2002-03
- Joe Sakic: 109 points in 1989-90 (vs. Gretzky); 100 points in 2006-07 (vs. Crosby)
- Jaromir Jagr: 60 ES points in 1991-92, 55 ES points (more, per ice-time, than Crosby) in 2016-17


Finally, I encourage you to get past this stubborn position that players of the past would like "wildly out of place" in today's NHL. OF COURSE THEY WOULD. And today's players would look wildly out of place in the NHL of twenty years from now. For some reason (and we all know why -- because he's the greatest) Gretzky is always the whipping-boy of this bizarre way of rationalizing recency bias. I never hear people arguing: "Gretzky would have scored 8 points per game vs. Joe Malone! Ha-ha! It proves how great he is!", but somehow this argument is perpetually used against Gretzky.

Denial is not just a river in Africa.
 
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Zine

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Casual hockey fans will love this. Let's put one player ahead of team success. Yee haw.

Nah. Not gonna happen. This is PR speak from Leonsis. Just hyping up Ovechkin signing. This wouldn't fly in the lockerrom with guys like Backstrom, Oshie, Wilson. Nor has it ever that I can recall. Well, apart from those awful Penguins teams when Mario put himself above everybody. But that's a special case where a selfish teammate is the owner.:eek2:
 

HurricaneFanatic

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Gretz wouldn't win multiple rockets in the modern era...possibly not even 1. No chance going up head 2 head with Ovi.

He'd rack up assists to be sure, but he's not scoring 50+ regularly.
There is really no way to know this. Gretzky with todays fitness, diets, modern workouts. Just no way of knowing that he wouldn't have gotten there.
 

Iapyi

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Nah. Not gonna happen. This is PR speak from Leonsis. Just hyping up Ovechkin signing. This wouldn't fly in the lockerrom with guys like Backstrom, Oshie, Wilson. Nor has it ever that I can recall. Well, apart from those awful Penguins teams when Mario put himself above everybody. But that's a special case where a selfish teammate is the owner.:eek2:

Fits the narrative for the player. :toothless
 

Midnight Judges

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I wish that were true, but it's pretty easy to look at the NHL population and identify that immigrants are almost entirely unrepresented. I did a count last season based on players of color, and found zero first-generation immigrants and six children of immigrants. It's possible that there may be some others who are not visible minorities (e.g. Stan Mikita) but those are going to be marginal cases relative to overall Canadian immigration, which comes overwhelmingly from Asia and the Middle East.

Most notably, only one player in the NHL last year had parents from a country which is in the top-10 for Canadian immigration. That was Jujhar Khaira, family from India, and only the 3rd Punjabi player in NHL history (the other two having retired in 1999 and 2016).

That is an absolutely disgraceful record for the NHL and the game of hockey in general, but it is the unfortunate reality we are faced with.



The graph below shows the number of native-born Canadian children over time. For reference:
  • Sidney Crosby was born in 1987
  • Connor McDavid was born in 1997
  • This year's draftees were born around 2002
  • Wayne Gretzky was born in 1961
ct004_en.gif



When we take the two points together (number of babies AND the fact that hockey draws poorly from the families who are now the major source of Canada's population growth) it's pretty clear that the Canadian talent pool is barely half what it was circa 1990.

That's before we even touch the question of whether most middle class children have more/less access to elite organized hockey today than they did 2-3 generations ago.

It's sad, but the numbers are what they are.

You make some good points but I am not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that the Canadian hockey pool is half of what it was. You provided good data but this conclusion is a leap.

If Canada peaked at roughly 480,000 births, and had roughly 370,000 and 348,000 when Sid and McDavid were born (respectively), how do you get down to barely half?

Demographics of Canada - Wikipedia

Even now 78-80% of Canadians identify as either Canadian or English or French or Italian or German or Scottish or Irish, and only 22% are minorities. So let's assume precisely 0 minorities are in the hockey talent pool. I mean, that's unfounded, but let's allow for it. That still would reduce the applicable births in 2020 (372,000) by 20% - resulting in 300,000. That's far more than half the peak of 480K.

In 1999-2000 that same figure for people of color figure was 13%:

People of Colour in Canada (Quick Take) | Catalyst

So McDavid's generation goes from 348,000 babies down to roughly 310,000, again, assuming your theory that non-whites don't play hockey is accurate, which it isn't entirely.

Crosby's generation presumably goes down by less. Maybe 11%? So instead of 370,000 it's more like 340,000?

Visible minority - Wikipedia

As for the speculation that you need elite hockey school now vs you didn't way back when, or economic privilege is somehow far less now than ever before when it comes to hockey, I find that to be highly speculative and anecdotal. If a young athlete is supremely talented enough to make the NHL, I'm not convinced they would be completely overlooked now whereas they would be found before. I had several guys in the history forum tell me that today's players can't afford hockey - therefore the generation that grew up in the Great Depression era had a huge advantage (Howe, Richard, Beliveau, Harvey, etc.). Seems rather unlikely to me.

So Sid's generation had a mere 73% of the largest generation (I assume 460K not the peak of 480K because 480 was not sustained) if we assume all non-whites don't count when in fact some of them do?

But even the above conclusion is poorly estimated because it assumes the immigrants of the past were insignificant or they all played hockey. Neither assertion is remotely accurate. Immigration is not a new phenomena in Canada. In fact proportionately speaking, way the hell larger immigration waves happened from 1890-1920 (400,000 in 1912 alone when Canada's population was 7.2M. That same number in 2019 was 341,000 when the population was 36M - proportionately way the hell smaller.) and 1940-1970 (282,000 immigrants in 1957 alone vs 225,000-275,000 throughout the 80s) than lately. Did those older immigrant populations play hockey? I am not aware of a big influx of Portuguese and Italians into the NHL after WWII. Are you?

After you factor in the older immigration waves, perhaps no adjustments are necessary at all, and the raw birth rates may be the best measuring stick.
 
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JustAnotherHockeyFan

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Jul 28, 2021
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Casual hockey fans will love this. Let's put one player ahead of team success. Yee haw.

Which part precludes the team from having success?

The first six words of my post you quoted is the correct answer.

Nah real hockey fans are all about witnessing hockey history being made in the record being broken. Now tryhards who care more about message board appearances than the actual sport, on the other hand...

I believe that every single team in the league can win more cups.

Why don't they? Only 4 teams won more cups than Ovechkin's since he joined the league, 2 of which got to obscenely game their payroll the years they did.

Fits the narrative for the player. :toothless

Wrong emoji :win:
 
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tarheelhockey

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You make some good points but I am not sure how you arrive at the conclusion that the Canadian hockey pool is half of what it was. You provided good data but this conclusion is a leap.

If Canada peaked at roughly 480,000 births, and had roughly 370,000 and 348,000 when Sid and McDavid were born (respectively), how do you get down to barely half?

Demographics of Canada - Wikipedia

Even now 78-80% of Canadians identify as either Canadian or English or French or Italian or German or Scottish or Irish, and only 22% are minorities. So let's assume precisely 0 minorities are in the hockey talent pool. I mean, that's unfounded, but let's allow for it. That still would reduce the applicable births in 2020 (372,000) by 20% - resulting in 300,000. That's far more than half the peak of 480K.

In 1999-2000 that same figure for people of color figure was 13%:

People of Colour in Canada (Quick Take) | Catalyst

So McDavid's generation goes from 348,000 babies down to roughly 310,000, again, assuming your theory that non-whites don't play hockey is accurate, which it isn't entirely.

Crosby's generation presumably goes down by less. Maybe 11%? So instead of 370,000 it's more like 340,000?

Visible minority - Wikipedia

As for the speculation that you need elite hockey school now vs you didn't way back when, or economic privilege is somehow far less now than ever before when it comes to hockey, I find that to be highly speculative and anecdotal. If a young athlete is supremely talented enough to make the NHL, I'm not convinced they would be completely overlooked now whereas they would be found before. I had several guys in the history forum tell me that today's players can't afford hockey - therefore the generation that grew up in the Great Depression era had a huge advantage (Howe, Richard, Beliveau, Harvey, etc.). Seems rather unlikely to me.

So Sid's generation had a mere 73% of the largest generation (I assume 460K not the peak of 480K because 480 was not sustained) if we assume all non-whites don't count when in fact some of them do?

But even the above conclusion is poorly estimated because it assumes the immigrants of the past were insignificant or they all played hockey. Neither assertion is remotely accurate. Immigration is not a new phenomena in Canada. In fact proportionately speaking, way the hell larger immigration waves happened from 1890-1920 (400,000 in 1912 alone) and 1940-1970 (282,000 immigrants in 1957 alone vs 225,000-275,000 throughout the 80s) than lately. Did those older immigrant populations play hockey? I am not aware of a big influx of Portuguese and Italians into the NHL after WWII. Are you?

After you factor in the older immigration waves, perhaps no adjustments are necessary at all, and the raw birth rates may be the best measuring stick.

Before I get into the rest, I take issue with the claims that I said “non-whites don’t play hockey” or anything resembling that.

What I said was that all the current major (top-10+) influxes of immigrants to Canada are visible minorities, which makes it conveniently easy to measure how many of those immigrant groups are putting players into the NHL (because a list of POC is easily found) which leads to a clear conclusion that one current NHL player comes from that background. That is not the same thing as saying non-whites don’t play hockey.

I think you’ve done some reasonable math above to come to the 73%. Obviously we’re never going to get to a precise number but as a broad estimate I don’t take issue with that.

In a context where the number of NHL teams has risen by half since 1990, and the overall Canadian population has grown by some 30%, it’s disheartening that the NHL talent base would actually recede during that timeframe. That speaks to the NHL’s/hockey’s failure to penetrate immigrant communities in a meaningful way, and also to the NHL’s willingness to settle for superficial solutions to its inclusion problem.

Did prior generations of immigrants feed the NHL? Well, there were more first-generation Finns and Swedes in a 10-team NHL in 1930 than there are first-generation Indians in the NHL in 2021. So it might not have been overwhelming, but it was something. In today’s league it’s statistically nothing, and that’s a problem.

Economics… unfortunately those issues have to be described anecdotally, because nobody is officially monitoring them. What, you think Hockey Canada’s going to fund a report saying hockey is becoming less inclusive? Is the NHL going to post an article about players who came from wealthy households? Of course not. Those organizations have no motive to address any issue in such a way that doesn’t end with “we’ve done a great job and the sport has never been healthier!”.

But simple observation tells you that the Canadian minor development system has consolidated and shrunk in recent decades. The elite tier has been privatized to the point of obvious economic exclusivity. Routine long-distance travel, beyond the financial or professional capacity of a working class family, is required in order to advance. Those kinds of changes don’t happen without cutting deeply into the middle class and especially the working class pipeline.

When we talk about 73%, when we talk about immigrant communities declining to adopt hockey, when we talk about soccer being massively more popular as a participation sport, the really insidious (and unmeasurable) underlying factor is the disappearance of the working class and even the average middle class family from the hockey development pipeline. At the end of the day, the NHL doesn’t care — they’ll have players on the ice under any circumstances — but as people who love the game for its own sake this stuff should be deeply concerning if not outrage-inducing.
 

um

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Gretz wouldn't win multiple rockets in the modern era...possibly not even 1. No chance going up head 2 head with Ovi.

He'd rack up assists to be sure, but he's not scoring 50+ regularly.
cmon man... Even Crosby has won 2 rockets, Gretzky would get at least that.

He himself lead the league in goals 5 times in his era and even using adjusted stats he's had a lot of amazing goal scoring years.
 
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McFlash97

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Gretz wouldn't win multiple rockets in the modern era...possibly not even 1. No chance going up head 2 head with Ovi.

He'd rack up assists to be sure, but he's not scoring 50+ regularly.

Where is that rock you live under ?

Gretzky in his prime with today's training and tech. No one would sniff him.

Stop embarrassing yourself.
 
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