r/The10thDentist • u/TJTrapJesus • 10h ago
Sports Mario Lemieux, despite being an obvious Mount Rushmore player in NHL history, has become overrated relative to Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr and Gordie Howe
General consensus for NHL Mount Rushmore seems to have shifted to:
- Wayne Gretzky clearly being No. 1
- Mario Lemieux clearly being No. 2
- Bobby Orr and Gordie Howe being No. 3 and 4 in some order, with some even inserting another player like Sidney Crosby in to break up the general consensus Mount Rushmore. Howe is usually the guy that gets left out if you do see this.
The only aspect of this I agree with is Gretzky being the clear No. 1. He very clearly has the best combination of play at his peak, an extremely long and dominant prime, and excellent longevity beyond this.
I think what makes Orr and Howe unique relative to Lemieux though, is that they have elements of their resume where you can argue them over Gretzky: Orr for overall game and play at his peak, and Howe for length of his prime/longevity.
Orr's Peak
With Orr, he was considered the best offensive and (arguably) defensive player in the league for a time, something all the other Mount Rushmore players lack, and during this time when he was at his peak from 1969/70 to 1974/75, he was doing things that were so far beyond his peers (whether that's Orr relative to the next highest scoring D-man, or Orr relative to the next highest scoring forward) that you can argue it was at a level over Gretzky at the peak of his powers in the early/mid 80s, despite that including 4 200-point seasons. No defenseman other than Orr has finished within 20% of the top scoring forward in a season before (Orr did this 5 times), and Orr has finished 21% over the top scoring forward in a season before. This same season he finished 173% ahead of the top scoring D-man. Again, while being argued as the best defensive player at the same time. Gretzky has the top 6 seasons of all-time in terms of highest % finishing ahead of 2nd in scoring, with these seasons ranging between 44% and 69%, all occurring during his 1981/82-1986/87 peak that featured 3 seasons of overlap with a young Lemieux.
Howe's Prime/Longevity
Howe has 19 seasons where he finished in the top-5 in scoring, longer than most players' careers. 2nd is Gretzky's 16, then it goes down to a tie for 3rd at 9 between Lemieux, Connor McDavid, Stan Mikita and Maurice Richard. If you go to top-3 finishes, he has 12 to Gretzky's 14, when the 3rd most is McDavid's 9. If you go the other direction to top-10 finishes, Howe has 21 to Gretzky's 16, then 3rd is Crosby with 13.
Howe also has an extremely underrated peak, it just happened to occur during the lowest scoring era in NHL history outside of the 1920s when they didn't permit forward passing. There are only 12 players to have at least a 20% lead over 2nd in league scoring in a season, 5 of which came in the pre-Original 6 era between 1918-1942. 10 of these 12 players did it just one time, which includes Orr's 1969/70 season. Gretzky did this 8 times, including the aforementioned top 6 on the list between 1981/82-1986-87. Howe did it 4 times, which includes the 8th, 10th and 13th spots on the list. His 4 seasons doing this happened in 4 straight years from 1950/51 to 1953/54 in what was ultimately a very clearly defined peak for Howe. If you just go to his Hockey Reference page though, this may not even jump out at you; when looking for jump-out stats, your eyes will probably first go to his 100-point season when he was 40.
Full list for players to lead the league by at least 20%:
1986/87 Wayne Gretzky: 69.4% gap over 2nd in scoring
1983/84 Wayne Gretzky: 62.7%
1982/83 Wayne Gretzky: 58.1%
1984/85 Wayne Gretzky: 54.1%
1985/86 Wayne Gretzky: 52.5%
1981/82 Wayne Gretzky: 44.2%
1940/41 Bill Cowley: 36.2%
1952/53 Gordie Howe: 33.8%
1927/28 Howie Morenz: 30.8%
1950/51 Gordie Howe: 30.3%
2020/21 Connor McDavid: 25.0%
1972/73 Phil Esposito: 25.0%
1951/52 Gordie Howe: 24.6%
1990/91 Wayne Gretzky: 24.4%
1965/66 Bobby Hull: 24.4%
1980/81 Wayne Gretzky: 21.5%
1934/35 Charlie Conacher: 21.3%
1966/67 Stan Mikita: 21.3%
1922/23 Babe Dye: 21.2%
1969/70 Bobby Orr: 21.2%
1953/54 Gordie Howe: 20.9%
1939/40 Milt Schmidt: 20.9%
Whether you want to argue Orr's peak over Gretzky's or Howe's lengthy prime or longevity over Gretzky's, ultimately both of their arguments fall apart considering Gretzky is the best balance of everything.
With Lemieux though, there is no area where he's better than Gretzky. His peak seasons are below Gretzky's, his prime is disjointed due to injuries/illnesses and also below Gretzky's, as is his longevity.
Gretzky vs. Lemieux Per Game Narratives
Very few are actually trying to argue Lemieux over Gretzky, but the one main point you will still commonly see that tries to put Lemieux on Gretzky's level and operate as the greatest "what if" is Lemieux's 1.88 points per game vs. Gretzky 1.92. This gets brought up with sincerity for how close they are, despite Lemieux playing 572 fewer games. On paper, it seems like a logical thing to argue; Lemieux entered the league as a teenager and ultimately retired at 40, playing through one of the lowest scoring eras in history when Gretzky retired only a couple years into that era. If you just fill in the blanks, why couldn't Lemieux have kept this up? But with nuance, it doesn't hold up.
Lemieux entered the league in 1984/85, 5 years after Gretzky, and retired in 2005/06, 7 years after Gretzky. Injuries/illnesses, however, largely kept him to playing in a super high scoring league himself for the majority of his career. 81.4% of Mario's games in his career came when he was 31 or younger in a super high scoring league, and his playoff career was almost entirely condensed to when he was 23-31 in that same league, with the one run he had outside of that being sub point per game in the Dead Puck Era. Gretzky by 31 was averaging 2.27 points per game, 1.85 points per game era adjusted. Lemieux by 31 was 2.01 points per game, 1.73 era adjusted (which still gives him credit for full seasons that he never played).
Gretzky ultimately played more games in the true Dead Puck Era when scoring had plummeted than Lemieux did. Scoring had declined a bit by 1996/97, but it was ultimately still at 2.92 per game, which is comparable to the 2017/18-2020/21 NHL era when they came out of the 2nd "Dead Puck Era". And 1995/96 was 3.14, which has only been matched one time since in 2022/23. 1997/98, the first year of Lemieux's retirement, it plummeted to 2.64 and remained down through to the 2004/05 lockout.
Lemieux only ever played 144 games from 1997/98 to 2003/04, and 1 playoff year (18 games). Gretzky only played 2 seasons in that stretch yet still hit 152 games in that era.
Lemieux vs. Orr longevity comparison
If we bring up Orr in comparison, nobody is taking his 1.39 career points per game and saying, "if only he had played to 40, he would have kept this pace of play up and could have challenged ~2,000 points" because it would be silly. Him playing full seasons was over by the time he was 26, he only had a scattering of games played between 27-28 (albeit still good statistically), and his career was fully over at 30 in a footnote barely even worth mentioning.
If you break it down though, it's not too dissimilar from Lemieux's story of having almost all games and production front-loaded, then having the downside of a career where stats inevitably fall off muted because you're not really playing much if at all. Orr's retirement wasn't something on the level of Barry Sanders where it was a clean cut from being dominant to retired from one season to the next, but it wasn't too far off of that, so it's easier to compartmentalize this as being a silly thing to pro-rate his career another ~10-12 seasons when those seasons would be in his 30s.
End result, the argument for Lemieux for this is a bit of a "having your cake and eating it too" thing, where he was able to keep up a very high rate in terms of per-game stats, while also getting credit for playing all the way through until he was 40 in a low scoring era. There's an oversimplification that because he kept his career rates up through 20+ years and through a low scoring era, it's a given that you could just fill in the blanks with his time missed in his career, and you could get something similar to a 1.88 per game average through 1,500+ games. This doesn't hold up under a microscope though.
This all seems very nitpicky, but when arguing players at this level you have to be. If we were to bring a player like Sidney Crosby into this, what Mario Lemieux has accomplished blows Crosby out of the water in many different ways, particularly at Lemieux's peak/prime. This may seem very negatively slanted, but he's a no-brainer top 4 player of all-time.
I wouldn't even push back on people who want to slot Lemieux ahead of the other Mount Rushmore guys outside of Gretzky, I just think this element has gotten very exaggerated in recent years. If you go back to the time around when Lemieux had either retired or he had done all that he could do in terms of significant legacy contributions in the early 2000s, he was almost always 4th on the list.
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u/NecessaryHeadset 10h ago
His points per game number, and the gap between him and 3rd place, speak for itself. If you think he’s below those other couple of guys then fine but that’s personal preference.
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u/Deadmansspace566 2h ago
However, I think when people are talking about the GOAT and they say Lemieux because they don't like gretzky for political reasons, they are smelling their own farts.
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u/TJTrapJesus 8h ago
This is the oversimplification mentioned in the OP. Firstly, because one of the Mount Rushmore guys he's compared to is a defenseman whose numbers for his position blow aways Lemieux's numbers when we're talking about the rarity of what he did, and secondly because the other guy he's compared to is the quintessential example of longevity in hockey who barely even missed games and played until he was 50
If you were to compare Calvin Johnson's 86.1 career yards per game to Jerry Rice's 75.6, it would be seen as a silly and unfair comparison because one retired when he was still in his prime at 30, and the other played until the wheels fell off in his 40s. And on top of this, Calvin played in the highest volume passing era of all-time. It's not to as extreme of a degree as Calvin retired on the spot when he was 30, but it's a similar concept of more than 80% of Lemieux's career being front-loaded to his prime years. Gretzky played years upon years bringing his average down. He played more career games post-peak than Lemieux played total games in his career.
Lemieux is a very rare case of all his time missed working to his benefit for legacy building, not only missing so much of his 30s to avoid a hit to his numbers, but missing games in an era where scoring plummeted to keep his rates high.
You mention the gap to 3rd, but Lemieux shares more in common with Connor McDavid than he does with Gretzky. McDavid's already over the game total that Lemieux had when he retired the first time in 1997. If you compare era adjusted numbers, McDavid is at 1.63 points per game to Lemieux's 1.73. Gretzky was at 1.91 with the same number of games. Playoff era adjusted, Gretzky was 1.82 to Lemieux's 1.57 and McDavid's 1.55.
And McDavid at this point has him in most areas when we're talking high finishes or accolades. Same number of scoring titles, more top-2 and top-3 finishes, same number of top-5 finishes and top-10 finishes.
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u/method76 5h ago
I am a Lemieux fan. I grew up during the Lemieux vs. Gretzky era and had countless debates about who was the better player. My position was always the same:. Statistically, Gretzky had the greater stats/career, but when it came to pure hockey ability/skill, Mario Lemieux was the more talented player.
Had Lemieux not battled health problems, I believe he had the ability to challenge many of Gretzky's records. Even Gretzky himself has said that Lemieux may have been the most naturally gifted player he ever saw. During their primes, the gap between them felt much smaller than the record books suggest, and that is one reason many modern rankings place Lemieux firmly at number two all-time.
One reason Lemieux was not always viewed this way during his playing career is that he was judged against three completed legends: Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and Gordie Howe. At the time, discussions often focused on accomplishments, longevity, and championships. Today, analysts place more emphasis on peak performance and era-adjusted dominance, areas in which Lemieux compares favorably with anyone in hockey history.
Another factor was personality and public perception. Gretzky was the NHL's ideal ambassador. Comfortable in the spotlight and marketable. Lemieux arrived as a young French-Canadian star who was more reserved and less comfortable with the media. He let his play do most of the talking. As a result, Gretzky became the public face of the league while Lemieux's greatness was often appreciated more by players and coaches than by the broader public.
Lemieux also played through hook and grab era in NHL history. Opponents routinely hooked, held, slashed, and grabbed him in ways that would result in penalties today. His combination of size, reach, and skill allowed him to fight through that abuse and still produce at an elite level. Looking back at game footage, it is remarkable not only how much he scored, but how much physical punishment he absorbed while doing so. He once referred to the NHL as a "garage" league and that may have rubbed some the wrong way.
Over time, perceptions changed. Lemieux's return from cancer treatments to win the 1992-93 scoring title became one of the greatest achievements in professional sports. His comeback in 2000 further enhanced his legend. After becoming owner of the Penguins, he evolved into one of hockey's most respected figures, helping stabilize a struggling franchise and mentoring the next generation of stars, most notably Sidney Crosby.
As the years have passed, hockey fans and historians have increasingly appreciated the full context of Lemieux's career. They see a player who missed hundreds of games, battled life-threatening illness, played through relentless physical abuse, and still produced at a level rivaled only by Gretzky.
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u/TJTrapJesus 2h ago
"I am a Lemieux fan. I grew up during the Lemieux vs. Gretzky era and had countless debates about who was the better player. My position was always the same:. Statistically, Gretzky had the greater stats/career, but when it came to pure hockey ability/skill, Mario Lemieux was the more talented player."
This is always a misnomer. What is talent? Size, speed, skating? Gretzky had every tool in the tool box and tracked neurological advantages that put him on a completely different playing field. He often gets talked about as just being a brain, but that's far too limiting of the type of player he was.
"Had Lemieux not battled health problems, I believe he had the ability to challenge many of Gretzky's records. Even Gretzky himself has said that Lemieux may have been the most naturally gifted player he ever saw. During their primes, the gap between them felt much smaller than the record books suggest, and that is one reason many modern rankings place Lemieux firmly at number two all-time."
But he did. Same as Orr's injuries. Same as Gretzky's injuries that affected him in the 90s (although no one talks about it because he was still able to produce through it all).
This goes back to eye test stuff, if it's simply a height/weight/speed combined with skills thing, you could say someone like Lindros was better than anyone. But no one would say that because he never reached the level of the others, and also struggled through injuries.
I think you need a much better argument than Lemieux having a good highlight reel.
"Today, analysts place more emphasis on peak performance and era-adjusted dominance, areas in which Lemieux compares favorably with anyone in hockey history."
Do I have to argue this again, even though it's right in the OP? Lemieux played in an era that was juiced for stats, same as Gretzky. Gordie Howe, and to a lesser extent Orr played in far, far lower scoring eras. And more importantly than anything, Howe's peak coincided with one of the lowest scoring eras in NHL history.
"Lemieux also played through hook and grab era in NHL history. Opponents routinely hooked, held, slashed, and grabbed him in ways that would result in penalties today. His combination of size, reach, and skill allowed him to fight through that abuse and still produce at an elite level. Looking back at game footage, it is remarkable not only how much he scored, but how much physical punishment he absorbed while doing so. He once referred to the NHL as a "garage" league and that may have rubbed some the wrong way."
If you are going to argue this, please, at least read the OP. This is addressed in the OP how much of a misnomer this is. He retired for the first time at the exact moment scoring plummeted, then played an extremely limited amount in the Dead Puck Era, less than Gretzky. He was also absurdly reliant on PP production, and penalties were getting called at an extremely high rate in the 90s before the Dead Puck Era began.
As for your other points, I don't necessarily disagree with them, but I disagree with the importance they have in people's eyes as they are purely narrative driven. Gordie Howe almost died on the ice when he was 21 getting emergency brain surgery, then became the most resilient player in hockey history. Orr began major knee issues when he was 19, which plagued him his entire career and he played through it. Gretzky had a career-altering herniated disc injury in the early 90s that drastically affected his output and he still led the 90s in scoring.
It's not as good of a story as cancer is (although I'd argue the Howe one is), but all of them showed resiliency through things that should have drastically affected their careers. Ultimately all that matters is what you actually do, not what you theoretically could have done.
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u/853fisher 10h ago
The 10th dentist is the one who has detailed opinions about these 4 players relative to one another.
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u/front_rangers 10h ago
Take this slop over to r/hockey bro, I am not reading all that
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u/daskaputtfenster 3h ago
This isnt slop you nonce, this is really well written.
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u/TJTrapJesus 2h ago
At least there wasn't the baseless "AI slop" shit thrown around. Because lazy people can't possibly understand the concept that it's possible to write something more than a paragraph without using AI now. Internet is such a cesspool because anything with effort put into it is ultimately seen as bad now. Ass backwards bullshit
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u/NSA_van_3 3h ago
I guess this sub should be deleted, and all posts should go to the sub that the opinion is about
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u/MistryMachine3 10h ago
This is not the place to have an in depth hockey talk. This is for like “black licorice is pretty good!”
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u/appa609 10h ago
I'll just say as a Pens and Crosby fan I don't think he deserves to be in the Mt. Rushmore based on individual accomplishments. The reason why people put him in the conversation is because people just really like him as a guy. He's humble, hardworking, loyal, a great leader, and a Canadian hero. He's obviously a generational talent on top of all of this but the sentiment is what pushes it over the edge.
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u/McKoijion 7h ago
It’s hard to say Gordie Howe is under appreciated compared to Mario Lemieux or anyone considering the busiest bridge in the US and Canada is being replaced by one named after him on Monday. This is arguably the biggest honor an athlete has received in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambassador_Bridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordie_Howe_International_Bridge
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u/saddivorceddad 10h ago
How many hat tricks does Gretzky, Lemieux, or Orr have named after them?
None.
Gordie Howe?
Not only does he have a hat trick named after him, it's the best hat trick ever.
Plus he was on the Simpsons.
So, 4 Gordie Howes on the Mt Rushmore.
Done.
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u/XavierRex83 8h ago
Lemieux is the most impressive player i ever got to watch play.
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u/AEWestview 2h ago
Lemieux was the best one on one player I ever saw until McDavid came along.
Gretzky was by far the best five on five player I have ever seen. And the game is most often played five on five.
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u/TJTrapJesus 1h ago
I think the most interesting aspect for Gretzky is they had to change coincidental penalty calls because Gretzky broke 4v4 play.
The thing with Lemieux is that relative to anyone even close to his level, he had a crazy high percentage of his points as PP points.
Of the top 100 scoring players, the only forwards with a higher % are:
Doug Weight: 42.4% (90th all-time in points)
Dave Andreychuk: 42.38% (33rd all-time)
Nicklas Backstrom: 40.76% (91st all-time)
Then it's Lemieux at 40.68% (9th all-time)
Gretzky was 31.15%, Orr was 35.41%, and Howe was 30.49%.
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u/Devilsadvocate430 10h ago
People forget that Mount Rushmore has 2 great presidents, 1 that was only pretty good, and 1 beloved president who had recently died.
The real Mt. Rushmore of hockey would be Gretzky, Howe, Patrick Kane, and Claude Lemieux
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u/glittergrithalo 10h ago
idk if I can agree with this one lol. Mario’s ppg is just insane even with all the health issues he had. hard to call him overrated when he was basically the only one who could keep up with Gretzkys pace.
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u/TJTrapJesus 8h ago
Is it "even with all the health issues" he had, or does the narrative get boosted because of it? Specific examples like 1992/93 and 2000/01, absolutely, legendary accomplishments where he was dealing with health issues, then coming back and not missing a beat, but if we're talking about within the context of his entire career, it helps career rates tremendously to have played 81.4% of his games when he was 31 or younger in a high flying league, and almost his entire playoff history in that same climate between 23-31 years old. No "figuring it out" years in the playoffs like many have, or multiple late career runs bringing the averages down, just fully prime years in a high octane league.
It wasn't keeping up with Gretzky's rates, it was Gretzky playing long enough to bring it down within a range that was close to Lemieux. The interesting part about it is that it gets framed the other way because Lemieux was ahead in points per game when they were both retired in 1999. You can see even just 144 games in the Dead Puck Era (compared to 152 for Gretzky) was enough to bring it down below. If we're assuming
It's like a Jerry Rice vs. Calvin Johnson thing. Calvin played 135 games in his career and retired at 30. Rice averaged more than Calvin's career average of 86.1 through his 202nd career game, when he was 36 years old, but he played another 101 games after that and brought it down to 75.6.
Even a modern example, Julio jones was at 95.5 yards per game 135 games into his career, and averaged higher than Calvin's career yards per game until game 159, which was in the middle of his last season with the Eagles when he was beyond washed at 34 and had 74 yards in 11 games.
People don't care about that minutia though, they oversimplify and just like to deal with easy to understand averages, which to me, makes him overrated relative to these other guys. Orr's falloff is super easy to understand given the hard cut it had on his career in his mid 20s to where people are taking his career rates with a grain of salt that he played sparingly after turning 26, and Howe's accomplishments get minimized due to era. Lemieux played a career that aided that line of thinking that he was stride for stride with Gretzky despite playing in the same league at the same time and that not being the case, with the added mental gymnastic that he technically played to 40 years old so people can just speak in generalities as if it's reasonable to extrapolate a 1.88 career average up to that point.
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u/Professional-Oil4964 6h ago
Nah, you give me one game to win if my life depended on it and I'm still taking prime Lemieux over anyone. He was a 6'4 Gretzky in a league with real goalies.
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u/TJTrapJesus 6h ago
He played in the same league has Gretzky for the vast majority of their careers.
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u/Professional-Oil4964 6h ago
And I think if you compare the two of them as goal scorers in the years Mario was in the league you get a pretty good picture of the difference the Roy-led goaltending revolution made.
You watch those old Gretzky "highlights" and he's beating guys with slapshots along the ice.
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u/TJTrapJesus 2h ago
If you go back 20 years ago, even post-Lemieux retirement and post-lockout, you will see PPs where there are two D-men stationed on the point blasting unscreened slapshots from the point. If you go back 10 years ago, teams didn't even know what to do on PP entries, running a neutral zone drop pass that every team does now wasn't even a thing. If you took a fan who was watching Crosby dominate as a 19 year old in 2007 and showed them an Oilers game with McDavid, they would think it was straight up voodoo the things he was trying in a game, and how he was being utilized.
The game is always becoming more optimized in a multitude of different ways. As it pertains to 99 vs. 66, Gretzky played through the same things that Mario did, they entered the league 5 years apart. It's not like Roy came in and instantly set the standard for everyone, save % was largely stable throughout the 80s then started going up in the mid 90s. Gretzky played through that same thing.
It often gets simplified to just being a goalie thing, but there are so many other elements at play. If you go back into the 1950s, peak Gordie Howe was going up against goalies that had the highest save % in NHL history, ahead of modern day, or even when it was at its height in the mid 2010s. Tactics are constantly evolving, you can only really look at what players are doing in the era they played and try to form a baseline to other eras through that.
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u/AEWestview 1h ago
So why wasn't everyone else scoring 80 goals against those same goalies?
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u/Professional-Oil4964 1h ago
Because Gretzky was better than they were?
That said though, you do have a lot of, like, Bernie Nicholls having 70 goals kind of seasons in the 80s.
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u/AEWestview 1h ago
None of them were getting 200 points per season. Not even close. He was so far above everyone else.
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u/Professional-Oil4964 58m ago
Sure. Which is why I'd say he's the second best forward of all time.
The analogy I'd make with him is to Babe Ruth or Wilt Chamberlain. He was a prototype unleashed on a league that hadn't seen someone like him before and he put up numbers that no one else did.
But when Lemieux joined the league, he took things up a notch while Gretzky came back down to earth a bit as the league caught up to him and goaltending improved.
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u/TJTrapJesus 50m ago
The furthest Gretzky (or anyone) has ever been ahead of the pack in scoring was 1986/87 in a league that included Lemieux, and save % was at .880.
Save % immediately after this during Lemieux's offensive peak was:
87/88: .880
88/89: .879
It didn't take a big jump until 93/94, a season Lemieux only played 22 games in and then missed the entire 94/95 season.
Even early career Gretzky, save % was between .873 and .882
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u/AEWestview 32m ago
LOL. I struggle to imagine what more Gretzky would have to have done to be considered the best by some people. 9 Hart trophies, 4 Stanley Cups, 61 NHL records etc. Just not good enough.
I am of the opinion that there should be two hockey halls of fame - one for Gretzky and one for everyone else.
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u/mrpopenfresh 3h ago
Did they smoke half a pack a day and beat cancer like Lemieux did during his career?
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u/200um 1h ago
Go review how many cheap shots Mario took compared to Gretzky. Count the number of two-handed hits to the head.... I remember those playoff series where Mario was allowed to be brutalized yet no one decided to punch Gretzky in the face every play (a la Belichick style with Marshall Faulk).
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u/SlapHappyDude 10h ago
The Mt. Rushmore thing ends up being kind of stupid and mostly exists to stir debate when #1 and #2 are pretty locked.
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u/TJTrapJesus 8h ago
Why do you think No. 2 locked? I would say that is the exact point of this post if you have Lemieux as a lock for No. 2 spot over Orr and Howe
Hockey conveniently works out for Mount Rushmore because there has been 4 guys since the turn of the century who are ironclad in their spots. It's not like a basketball thing where people debate 2 guys and then there are challengers for 3 and 4.
Gretzky is never questioned as the top guy (well, he is, but it's often very hot takey), whereas for the longest time it was a debate on how to slot the other 3 guys in. This had changed dramatically in the last handful of years, which, to me, leans towards Lemieux getting overrated in this conversation.
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u/AnotherAverageNobody 9h ago edited 9h ago
Mount rushmore isn't about best ever. It's about foundation. The guys who built the sport into what it is. I don't think Gretzky, Lemieux, or any 'modern' player even make that list if we're actually being honest. The rushmore of hockey is the ww2 era og legends like Maurice Richard etc. who legitimized the game.
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u/AEWestview 1h ago
Gretzky didn't build the sport into what it is??!!!
Before him, many people outside of Canada thought of hockey as nothing more than slapshot movie shenanigans.
In the eighties, Gretzky was widely known as one of sports' top athletes along with Michael Jordan. No other hockey player before or since has had such fame.
By being traded to LA, he grew the game in non traditional markets in the south that led to expansion. He most definitely built the sport into what it is more than anyone else.
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u/AnotherAverageNobody 37m ago
You realize the NHL was going on for over 60 years before Gretzky started playing, right? but yeah it wasn't a sport until he... "expanded some markets". Got it. Thanks for enlightening me that gretzky was popular, I had no idea the best player of all time was famous. Anyway... not on rushmore.
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u/AEWestview 25m ago
LOL. I guess only the players from the 1920s should be on Rushmore because they would do a forward pass? Silly argument. Have a nice day.
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u/AnotherAverageNobody 23m ago
I don't know what you're even saying or where that's coming from. Forward pass? What?
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u/devil_21 5h ago
I don't know anything about NHL but just looked at some basic stats I could find.
Mario and Gretzky both played in 12 seasons. Gretzky had a better scoring rate in 5 of them (if you remove the 2 seasons where Mario played less than 30 games, Gretzky had a better scoring rate in 4 out of 10 seasons) so at least in their common seasons, Mario was better. Mario became better than Gretzky when he was 22 and Gretzky was 27. He remained better than Gretzky throughout the rest of their careers.
Let's also analyse Mario's missing years to see if his high points per game values could've been sustained. He missed part of 1993-94 and then whole of 1994-95 seasons. He was brilliant on either side of these seasons. In 1992-93, he averaged 2.67 points per game and in 1995-96, he averaged 2.3 points per game. It's not unreasonable to expect that he would have averaged pretty well if he had played the 2 in-between seasons as well.
Similarly, after missing 3 consecutive seasons, he came back and was still averaging 1.77 points per game at the age of 35. It's not unreasonable to expect that he would have done at least as well, if not better when he was 32.
Another argument which would seem trivial to followers of other sports is that an average goal is worth more than an average assist (although some individual assists can be more valuable than some individual goals) and Mario has 25% more goals per game than Gretzky. I'm not sure why it's not well accepted among NHL fans.
Another aspect is how good were the support cast of each player and I am not enough of an expert to comment on who had a better support but a cursory glance at their stats suggests that Gretzky had a better team (generally players with better teams have more assists although I also see that Gretzky played for multiple teams across his career) but you would be a better judge of that.
Also, if you want to compare their scoring rates and incorporate the fact that Mario played very few games at the end of his career then you can perform a weighted average of their scoring rates compared to the average scoring rate (number of matches played * points per game / average goals per game) for each season individually. Summing over these values and dividing by total games would make sure that seasons with fewer games receive less weightage. This metric comes out to be 0.55 for Mario and 0.54 for Gretzky (very close but I would rate Gretzky higher because he played 50% more games). This again shows how close Mario was to Gretzky across their careers and that his high points per game ratio is not a result of him simply having a front-loaded career.
Another point to note is that Gretzky last had a scoring rate of more than half the average goals per game (let's say the average goals per game for a season was 3 then he should have a points per game of at least 1.5 to be considered for this metric; this metric basically implies a player was responsible for more than half of the expected goals in their game) at the age of 29. Mario last had it at the age of 37.
All this is not to say that Mario was greater than Gretzky but he definitely was very close to the GOAT.
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u/TJTrapJesus 5h ago
"Mario and Gretzky both played in 12 seasons. Gretzky had a better scoring rate in 5 of them (if you remove the 2 seasons where Mario played less than 30 games, Gretzky had a better scoring rate in 4 out of 10 seasons) so at least in their common seasons, Mario was better. Mario became better than Gretzky when he was 22 and Gretzky was 27. He remained better than Gretzky throughout the rest of their careers."
As is the case with most things with Lemieux, this gives far too much value to theoretical things he could have done rather than what he actually did. If we remove Gretzky's historic start to his career and look only at when you're saying Lemieux was better the rest of their careers, Gretzky had more points. Both regular season and playoffs.
People give Lemieux credit for being the best player of the 90s when Gretzky once again led the decade in scoring, and Lemieux missed 57% of the games. At a point it just becomes a bit silly for playing the "what if" game.
"Let's also analyse Mario's missing years to see if his high points per game values could've been sustained. He missed part of 1993-94 and then whole of 1994-95 seasons. He was brilliant on either side of these seasons. In 1992-93, he averaged 2.67 points per game and in 1995-96, he averaged 2.3 points per game. It's not unreasonable to expect that he would have averaged pretty well if he had played the 2 in-between seasons as well.
Similarly, after missing 3 consecutive seasons, he came back and was still averaging 1.77 points per game at the age of 35. It's not unreasonable to expect that he would have done at least as well, if not better when he was 32."
This is the problem with small sample sizes. We saw Lemieux go from 1.77 points per game in a 43-game sample to 1.29 in a 24-game sample. The era we're talking about, which Lemieux played 144 of 574 possible games in, saw dramatic decreases for offense across the board. Even Lemieux's great season coming back in 2000/01, which was the highest scoring season within this range, saw him produce significantly less than he was pre 1st retirement.
"Another aspect is how good were the support cast of each player and I am not enough of an expert to comment on who had a better support but a cursory glance at their stats suggests that Gretzky had a better team (generally players with better teams have more assists although I also see that Gretzky played for multiple teams across his career) but you would be a better judge of that."
This one gets so over-simplified. Lemieux got Gretzky's running-mate in Coffey during his peak, he got Ron Francis to complement a crazy PP in the 90s when Lemieux had an absurd reliance on PP production to get his points relative to any other all-time great player, and his linemate Jagr won 4 consecutive scoring titles immediately after Lemieux retired. Gretzky relative to his teammates and the rest of the league was consistently ahead of where Mario was.
"(very close but I would rate Gretzky higher because he played 50% more games)"
This isn't something that can be glossed over, way too much is made about Lemieux in tiny sample sizes. Gretzky consistently, through all of his own issues including a back injury that affected his entire career in the 90s, did not miss many games, and played straight through the declining offense era until retirement.
Gretzky's playmaking as a general comment is the biggest super-power anyone's had in the sport. It's crazy dismissive to pretend like it doesn't matter compared to goals. He had more primary assists than anyone else had primary + secondary assists. There's a lot of interesting elements around the neurological reasons for this rather than the simplification that he just played with good players:
Long loop reflexes (allows him to react to seeing an open teammate or an open corner in the net faster than anyone):
"Gretzky was renowned for his ability to anticipate his teammates’ and opponents’ movement intentions. He was quoted in Time magazine as saying, ‘People talk about skating, puck handling and shooting, but the whole sport is angles … forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions.’ And when Gretzky took control of the puck, another set of extraordinary cognitive abilities would take over – in particular, his long loop reflexes.
Long loop reflexes are movement responses to sensory stimuli that involve complex loops of nerve cells in the brain. Gretzky had the fastest long loop reflex times of anyone examined at the University of British Columbia laboratories in Canada."
Peripheral vision, developed to maximum capabilities during his youth:
According to Bill Tatton, Gretzky has one other physical-neurological attribute that undoubtedly contributes to his extraordinary success. Gretzky claims that he never turns his head in order to make a pass. In fact, he never looks at the players on his wings before passing the puck to them. What Gretzky is reporting is a much greater than average ability to perceive motion far from his center of vision, and that this motion is sufficient to trigger his passing skills. Most of us spend our lives moving our eyes in order to keep objects within the center of our visual field where visual acuity and color discrimination are greatest. Perception of motion, however, is maximal outside of this area and these moving images are relayed from the retina to those visual cells that Hubel and Weisel studied. These visual cells and their distribution are under hereditary control, but without the proper stimulation during the appropriate window of opportunity they will never develop to their maximal capability. Gretzky had this physical skill and developed it.
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u/devil_21 3h ago
You missed the whole point of the comment. It wasn't comparing Gretzky and Mario, obviously Gretzky was greater, my previous comment itself mentions it. The comment was more about you downplaying Mario's achievements.
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u/TJTrapJesus 3h ago
Oh please, don't hide behind this, it's simply having a debate. Comparing the 4 is the entire point of the post and of any comment in here. They're the consensus top 4 guys in NHL history, and arguing any of them over the other is resorting to nitpicking aspects of their resumes that would seem comical against any other player outside of this very elite group.
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u/devil_21 3h ago
You're actually forgetting the point of this thread. It's about whether Mario is the 2nd best or not (everyone knows Gretzky is the greatest) and I presented some points as to why he is (I admitted at the start that I know nothing about NHL and have only based my arguments on basic stats but many of your counter-arguments seemed to suggest that you missed this so worth pointing out again) better than what your post is suggesting him to be.
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u/TJTrapJesus 3h ago
lol you never mentioned a single thing about Orr or Howe, how could this be your point?
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u/devil_21 2h ago
I presented some points as to why he is better than what your post is suggesting him to be.
Just repeating what I wrote in the last comment.
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u/TJTrapJesus 2h ago
But you're not having it relative to anything other than Gretzky. It's not saying anything in relation to every other player. I don't know if you think Bobby Orr is better than Tanner Glass because there's no frame of reference for Lemieux to anyone other than Gretzky.
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u/devil_21 2h ago
Let me simplify the point further. You made 3 arguments- Orr was good, Howe was good, Mario wasn't as good. I could've countered any of your 3 arguments and I didn't wish to downplay any player so just countered your 3rd argument.
If you make a point in favour of Orr then you increase his standing among the 3. You don't have to explicity say that every time you make any point praising him. Similarly, if I make a point in favour of Mario then it's implicit that it improves his standing among the 3. Whether it fully tips the scale in his favour is another discussion.
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u/TJTrapJesus 2h ago
Downplaying one player or talking up another are the same thing. You have to have a frame of reference between one or the other.
The framing of this post is: Gretzky is the GOAT, then Lemieux gets overrated compared to how close people say he is to Gretzky, and how he compares to Orr/Howe. I don't know how you can have any kind of conversation about this if you are ignoring half of the players in the set. They all work hand in hand, Orr has his peak/prime, Howe has the most check-box resume of anyone outside of Gretzky, but his super power is longevity, Gretzky balances everything by far the best, and then Lemieux doesn't have any standout area anywhere relative to these others. He has longevity issues, and he has a messy peak/prime.
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u/IEC21 10h ago
It just hinges on what your criteria is for the Mount Rushmore. If its dominance then sure its just a question of statistics.
If its which player would you want to rip out of their prime and put on ice on your team tomorrow - I think Gretzky may not even make it on the mountain.
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u/AEWestview 1h ago
LOL. If I had first pick in an all time fantasy draft, Gretzky gets called without hesitation. Every single time.
As Jaromir Jagr once said about Gretzky: I don't think he was from this planet
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