The Puck Stops Here

I have written a series of posts that look at the sabermetrics and hockey problem of adjusting scoring from different eras. These posts have used the normalization method of the hockey outsider (Peter Albert). I have written posts on the best single season goal, assist and point scoring efforts and the career leaders in adjusted goals and adjusted assists. These lists have given us some very good players, but they are not without problems. The single season assist and point lists are overly dominated by 1920's players who falsely benefit from a false normalization problem. Basically, there were so few assists in that era that those who were the leaders at that time are normalized to look like they had tremendous assist totals (despite often having single digit totals in reality). This problem goes away on career lists (for the most part) because careers in that era were not as long as they are today. There is also a problem that the original six era is underrepresented. This lead to a discussion of strength of competition adjustments.

Today, I will look at the top 10 career adjusted point leaders. Here they are:

Top 10 Adjusted Point Scoring Careers of All Time

Name	Teams	Seasons	Adjusted Points	Actual Points
Wayne Gretzky	Ind(WHA) Edm(WHA) Edm LA StL NYR	21	2609	2967
Gordie Howe	Det Hou(WHA) NE(WHA) Har	31	2560	2358
Mark Messier	Cin(WHA) Edm NYR Van	26	1778	1898
Bobby Hull	Chi Win(WHA) Win Har	23	1771	1808
Ron Francis	Har Pit Car Tor	25	1738	1798
Steve Yzerman	Det	22	1685	1755
Mario Lemieux	Pit	22	1577	1723
Joe Sakic	Que Col	17	1555	1489
Jaromir Jagr	Pit Was NYR	15	1555	1432
Phil Esposito	Chi Bos NYR	18	1517	1590

Points from this season are not included in the totals. This affects both Joe Sakic and Jaromir Jagr (who are tied going into this year with 1555 career adjusted points).

Its no surprise that Wayne Gretzky leads this list by a significant margin. He is the best scorer in hockey history. It is suspicious that few original six players are represented on this list (in fact every player that made it had a career that lasted until the 1980's at least). This does correspond to the time when careers began to grow in length, however I think is partially an artifact of the way this normalization method undervalues the high competition in the original six era.