Here’s one rough’n’ready measure of Gretzky’s dominance.
Every spring, across Canada, folks get together for friendly Stanley Cup hockey pools - typically, each one in the pool in turn gets to pick a player from the NHL, and put together their own team. They get a point for each goal, and for each assist, that their players make during the playoffs.
At the time of Gretzky’s peak (late 80s, early 90s), many pools split him into two players: Gretzky (goals) and Gretzky (assists), because otherwise, whoever got Gretzky in the draw would likely win the pool.
Purely as a slight diversion - can someone explain to me the reasoning behind assigning players a ‘points’ total in the scoring tables? (In case anyone is unsure I am in no way an Ice Hockey expert).
I understand the concept of assists - I’m happy to acknowledge those players who give out a lot of assists - but surely the game is about goals? That’s how it is scored. My understanding is that if a goal involves both an assister and a scorer, they both get a ‘point’ - whereas if a player scores a solo goal, he is the only one to get a point.
Also, it is far easier to get an assist than a goal - basically it seems the last player to touch the puck before the goal scorer gets credited with an assist. Given that goalies save about 90% of all shots, surely the greater skill is in the actual scoring. Literally hundreds of perfectly good assists must be wasted by the goal scorers failing to finish.
No one denies a great assist - those ones where the perfect pass results in the scorer just administering a tap-in that ‘My Grandmother could have scored!’ - but, lets be honest - most assists aren’t that.
Is an assist really as valuable as a goal - or has it just become recognized as such because we (and the media) rank players by total points rather than goals?
RickJay will be able to deal with this better than me, but an assist rewards the player who sets up the goal. It takes considerable skill to bring the puck past the other team’s offensive line, and in among their defencemen, and then make the pass on the fly to the sniper who can make the shot. They’re different types of skills.
That was one of the reasons Gretzky was so great - he could do both, at an equally high level. In fact, I remember reading, back when he was at his prime, that one measure of his abilities was that his teammates had higher personal scoring stats in the shifts when he was on the ice than in the shifts when he was off the ice. He was a master at setting up the goal for his teammates, even if he didn’t score it himself.