Meat's Back On The Menu Boys!

Whew, July is finally over. It is amazing, for a month that starts out so busy, what with free agency and all, July really seems to drag on forever. Granted my own laziness factored into the recent lack of activity around these parts the last couple weeks, but it is time to put all of that behind us. It is a new month and there is work to be done. Most likely August will be even quieter than July was for the NHL, but if all goes according to plan things will be in full swing here.

Here is some of what you can look forward to here in the coming weeks:

• I will be using OI% to break down the NHL's leading scorer in each season since 1940 in an attempt to determine which players had the best offensive single seasons in modern NHL history. I will be doing one decade at a time, probably at a pace of two posts per week.
• The Salary Cap Challenge is coming. This year's version will be bigger and better than before. Invites should be going out this weekend and I hope to have the results for you around mid-month.
• With help once again from my friends at WhatIfSports.com I will be taking another trip back in time. This time we will be visiting the Spring of 1996.
• I will have plenty of preview coverage leading up to September's release of NHL 09 from EA Sports.
• I will start to get back into fantasy mode towards the end of the month and should have plenty of fantasy hockey coverage for you between here and my new second home over at Going Five Hole.

This is just some of what I have lined up to get us through August and to the start of training camps. The off-season is far from over, but I plan on making the best of the remaining time until pucks start dropping again.

Looking Back To Look Ahead

It's housekeeping time here at TOFTT. I have a few items to discuss as I ramp up for what I hope will be a busy, entertaining, and insightful off-season. First of all, I published my last article for RotoTimes.com, which you can read here, this week. My contract is now at an end for them, but hopefully I'll be able to work something out so that I can continue writing for them in the future. I think it was a nice exercise for me to have a format and deadlines and I would like the chance to take it to another level in 2008-09.

Now, let's talk about what you can expect to see here in the coming weeks. First up, I will be doing a free agency preview for each division, starting tomorrow with the Pacific. My plan is to do one division per day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week and next. I am going to start with the Pacific Division tomorrow and then work east until I wrap it all up with the Atlantic Division next Thursday. I will also more than likely mix in some other free agency commentary between now and July 1st.

Beyond that, I have other irons in the fire for the summer months. I will be doing another Salary Cap Challenge as well as another Prediction Panel. As before I will be enlisting the help of some of the blogosphere's best and brightest to participate in those posts. I also want to continue my analysis using Offensive Involvement Percentage (OI%) to break down the true top scorers of the NHL's past. My tentative plan with that is to break down the scoring leaders in each season by decade and see how they stack up. I will most likely tackle one decade per week (starting with the 1940's) and then keep a running list of the top 10 OI%'s in modern NHL history. So that is what I have planned so far. I will also be working on The Flower Shop so be sure to check in there as well. As always I'm open to feedback and ideas, so if you have any thoughts on where I should take this site during the harsh months of summer please by all means shoot me an e-mail.

Finally, I have a little gift out there for all hockey fans, but Penguins fans in particular. You can say what you will about the NHL, but in my opinion they are by far the best major sports league when it comes to using the internet to make their game more accessible to fans. With that in mind, I give you the classic Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Just in case you have 3 hours to kill.

Which Is Truly The Single Best Offensive Season Ever?

I have been running across a lot of old hockey clips from the late 70's and 80's lately and I just can't get over how bad the goaltending used to be in the NHL. That got me thinking about some of Wayne Gretzky's records and how he benefited from being in the league during that era. Comparing different eras in sports is always difficult, but I felt compelled to come up with a way to compare some of the biggest single offensive seasons in recent NHL history and see which was really the most impressive.

I used the following method of comparison; I picked the most impressive single season point totals since 1980 to put up against each other. I then determined the player's Points Per Game (PPG) for each season and then divided that by the overall average Goals Per Game (GPG) in the NHL for that season to determine that player's Offensive Involvement Percentage (OI%). The OI% was the percent of goals that player figured in on by a per game basis, using the league average GPG. This basically told me how much scoring a player accounted for per game compared against the NHL average as a whole. It's not a perfect method, but it does give hard numbers across the last 25+ years in the NHL.

For my comparisons I used the following seasons:

• Wayne Gretzky 81-82 (80 GP, 212 P)
• Wayne Gretzky 85-86 (80 GP, 215 P)
• Mario Lemieux 88-89 (76 GP, 199 P)
• Mario Lemieux 92-93 (60 GP, 160 P)
• Mario Lemieux 95-96 (70 GP, 161 P)
• Jaromir Jagr 98-99 (81 GP, 127 P)
• Jaromir Jagr 00-01 (81 GP, 121 P)
• Mario Lemieux 00-01 (43 GP, 76 P)
• Sidney Crosby 06-07 (79 GP, 120P)

The NHL GPG averages for those seasons were:

• 81-82 - 8.03 GPG
• 85-86 - 7.94 GPG
• 88-89 - 7.48 GPG
• 92-93 - 7.25 GPG
• 95-96 - 6.29 GPG
• 98-99 - 5.27 GPG
• 00-01 - 5.51 GPG
• 06-07 - 5.89 GPG

This resulted in the following OI%'s for each player:

• Wayne Gretzky 81-82 - 33%
  
• Wayne Gretzky 85-86 - 33.85%
  
• Mario Lemieux 88-89 - 35%
  
• Mario Lemieux 92-93 - 36.78%
  
• Mario Lemieux 95-96 - 36.57%
• Jaromir Jagr 98-99 - 29.75%
  
• Jaromir Jagr 00-01 - 27.11%
  
• Mario Lemieux 00-01 - 32.08%
  
• Sidney Crosby 06-07 - 25.79%

Now this is where things get interesting. Using the above stats I was able to take the resulting OI%'s above and then use them to project point totals for each player in each of the other seasons. In other words, I could tell you how many points were the 81-82 equivalent of Jagr's 127 points in the 98-99 season. Think of is as some kind of scoring exchange rate. For the sake of balanced projections, I calculated the projected point totals based on the same number of games played by the actual point leader that season. So for example, the 81-82 projections are all based on the player playing in 80 games, just like Gretzky did that season. One exception: for the 92-93 season I calculated all players' totals based on playing 80 games, due to Lemieux only playing 60 games because of his bout with Hodgkin's Disease. Also, for the 00-01 season, I recalculated Mario's "total" based on playing 81 games, just like Jagr did that year.

Here are the projections:

(click to enlarge)

So going by these projections we can see that Mario Lemieux is actually the owner of the two "best" offensive seasons in modern NHL history based on his OI% from the 92-93 and 95-96 seasons. If Mario had played at the level he did in the 92-93 season during the 85-86 season he would have scored an NHL record 236 total points. Not too shabby.

Again I stress that what I have done here isn't perfect, but it does give a foundation for comparing scoring in the NHL across many seasons. The real conclusion to all of this, if you could call it that, would have to be that as scoring went down in the NHL over the years points became harder to come by and thus are arguably more valuable, for lack of a better term, than points accrued during the wide open glory days of the NHL in the 80's. Naturally you could expand the range of this exercise and probably find some seasons from longer ago that compare favorably to Lemieux and Gretzky. In the meantime I feel very comfortable saying that while Wayne Gretzky may own the major single season scoring records in NHL history, Mario Lemieux has actually had the best offensive seasons in the history of the NHL.