dr. recchi said:
I played 58 games for Pittsburgh in 1991-92 and was having another good year. I had 33 goals and 37 assists for 70 points, but everything changed for me on February 19, 1992.
i love that we now have easy access to all this info. as of feb 18, recchi had 68 points, good for 15th in the league, immediately behind housley (12), andreychuk (13-t), and turgeon (ha), tied with fedorov and damphousse, and immediately ahead of gilmour (18), fellow pittsburgh RW joey mullen (19), and randy burridge (wtf?). coffey, lafontaine, and trevor linden were tied for 21st with 62 points.
so yes it's accurate to say recchi was having a good year, but it was sandwiched between finishing 4th in scoring in '91, his 10th place 123 point season in '93, and finishing 5th in 1994. it certainly was an off year for him, by peak scoring recchi standards.
at the same time, the day before the trade, kevin stevens was leading the league with 89 points in 57 games, directly ahead of gretzky (three fewer games) and hull who were tied for 2nd, and mario (13 fewer games) and yzerman tied for 4th. and what we know from the stats we now have is that recchi and stevens had basically identical PP production (recchi actually had four more PP points). but stevens almost doubled recchi's ES scoring, 59 to 33.
what happened? according to the game logs, recchi played mostly with francis and errey at ES. the top line was stevens and mario with jagr or mullen (who at the time of the trade was outscoring recchi at ES by 13 points). sophomore jagr was tied for 54th in scoring, with 51 points in 48 games, but basically got zero PP time (six PP points), while also destroying recchi at ES (45 to 33).
it was also by far the most slanted PP:ES ratio of recchi's 20s, with his PP production exactly equalling his ES scoring one-to-one and at the end of the year he was tied with macinnis and lafontaine for 5th in PP points, and tied with mike ridley, cliff ronning, and dale hunter for 37th at ES. but look at what he was working with at ES: at the time of the trade, francis was tied for 130th in scoring with kelly buchberger, brian benning, bruce driver, brian mullen, desjardins, paul ranheim, randy wood, and mikael andersson. to be fair, francis had missed roughly 10 games. still, he was only one point ahead of rookie bure, who had played even fewer games and hadn't yet had the incredible scoring run that helped him steal the calder from amonte and lidstrom. and of course, bob errey is bob errey, a man so impervious to offense that he couldn't score 60 points on a line with mario.
some observations:
- recchi only marginally increased his scoring rate after the trade, 1.21 to 1.23. again, it was his worst season in a four season stretch. but it was also the only postseason all-star nod of his career, finishing a clear second behind hull (who got 100% of the first place votes) and ahead of mullen in third, linden in fourth, and gartner in fifth. this maybe tells us that we should take postseason all-stars with a grain of salt; this was basically a default win, with fleury having an off-year, mogilny and jagr emerging but not there yet, bure being a rookie, and selanne a year away. meanwhile he was 5th in AST voting in '91, and 4th in '93 and '94.
- bowman had recchi primarily on a pretty two-way line, with francis and errey. so 1. why did bowman have recchi on practically a checking line? and 2. what did he expect?
- man, ron francis in pittsburgh before he hooked up with jagr... 17 points in 24 games in the '91 cup run (literally half the points recchi had), and then 54 points in 70 games in the '92 regular season. then he puts up 100 points in '93 and the rest is history. but i think, on top of becoming jagr's full-time center, to both players' mutual benefit, after adam graves injured mario in the rangers series, another factor for francis coming back from the statistical dead is that he inherited recchi's role on the PP after the trade.
