Quote:
Originally Posted by Weitz
You could argue. But you’d be wrong. Goals per game is basically irrelevant. Era adjusted matters more.
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Goals per game is actually highly relevant. Yes, you want to adjust it for era. But you also have to keep in mind length of career:
Lemieux at his peak was, I think you'll find, a better scorer (even era-adjusted) than Ovechkin at his peak. But Lemieux's peak was shorter because he contracted Hodgkin lymphoma and missed several years. He was a better player, but through no fault of his own, didn't get to play as many games.
If Bossy's career hadn't been cut short by injuries, how many more goals, even era-adjusted goals, would he have scored by the time he was the age Ovechkin is now? Impossible to say.
There was a controversy some years back in baseball, because players who had fairly pedestrian stats were getting into the Hall of Fame simply on longevity. They played 20 years in MLB and their aggregate totals looked impressive, but there was no point in their careers at which they looked like dominant players. That's the downside of looking at career numbers. Obviously Ovechkin was and is a dominant player and belongs in the Hall of Fame; but now we're talking about which
one player is the greatest scorer of all time, so he has a higher bar to clear. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that he clears it.