Edmonton Oilers superstar Connor McDavid has made headlines this season for piling up points at a pace not seen in the NHL since the mid-1990s.
At the time of this post, McDavid had racked up 127 points in 67 games, putting him on pace for 155 points, which would be the highest total since Mario Lemieux tallied 161 in 1995-96.
McDavid’s performance raises the question: Where does his season rank in a historical context?
Comparing the accomplishments of hockey players across different eras can be a daunting task. Factors such as rule changes, technology and equipment, playing style, league size and composition, and the length of seasons make it a challenge to make direct comparisons.
The Z-score method
An analytical tool called a Z-score provides a unique and objective way to compare players across different eras.
Z-score, also known as a standard score, is a statistical measure that represents the number of standard deviations that a data point is above or below the mean of a dataset.
A Z-score of 0 represents a data point that is equal to the mean of the dataset, while a positive Z-score represents a data point that is above the mean and a negative Z-score represents a data point that is below the mean.
The Z-score is useful in statistical analysis because it allows you to compare data points from different datasets that may have different means and standard deviations. By converting data points into Z-scores, you can standardize the data and easily compare the relative positions of data points within their respective datasets.
In other words, we can use Z-score to measure a player’s dominance relative to his peers in a given season. For this exercise, we looked at the top 25 scorers (and ties) for each season in the expansion era, which began when the NHL added six teams for the 1967-68 season, ending the Original Six era.
After taking the top 25 scorers, we calculated the mean and the standard deviation for each season, allowing us to calculate a Z-score.
How McDavid stacks up
We know McDavid is having an incredible season, but how does his performance rank against other all-time great seasons?
Here are the top 25 points totals of the expansion era as measured by Z-score:
What comes as no surprise is that Wayne Gretzky owns eight of the top 14 scoring seasons by Z-score, including the top six.
Although Gretzky amassed four 200-point seasons – no other player has hit that threshold once – his best season by Z-score was his measly 183-point effort in 1986-87, when the scoring environment had simmered down a bit relative to the absolute wildest of the run ‘n gun days that characterized the early ‘80s.
When using Z-score, we find that McDavid’s current season would be the second-best non-Gretzky season ever. What’s crazy though is that McDavid already owns the best non-Gretzky season – a 105-point effort in the COVID-compressed 2020-21 season.
Regardless of where his final point total lands this season, suffice it to say that McDavid, who just turned 26, has already cemented his place among the game’s all-time greats.
Factors that affect comparisons across eras
The NHL has seen scoring ebb and flow over the years due to a variety of aforementioned factors.
For example, NHL games throughout much of the ’80s resembled pond hockey. They were wide-open, high-scoring affairs in which defensemen looked like they were on roller skates and lightly equipped, undersized goalies flopped around like wounded seals.
While Lemieux’s monster 199-point season in 1988-89 remains the most points anyone besides Gretzky has ever scored, his output that season ranks only 17th by Z-score.
Meanwhile, the dead puck era that started in the late ’90s was characterized by Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man-sized goalies, incessant clutching and grabbing, and something called the left-wing lock. (The last of which sounds like a GOP political tactic but in reality was a system that offensively challenged NHL teams deployed to suck the fun out of hockey.)
Jarome Iginla’s sub-100-point season in 2001-02 highlights the depths to which scoring plummeted during the dead puck era. Not only did the Flames sniper make the list with only 96 points, Iginla’s output that season compares favorably to a pair of 160-point-plus seasons from Lemieux when adjusting for scoring environment.
McDavid enters Gretzky’s stratosphere
Trying to compare the accomplishments of hockey players across different eras will always be subject to plenty of debate, but using the Z-score method provides an objective way to do the best we can.
Gretzky’s place atop the pantheon of the best hockey players ever is safe for now, especially when you factor in his four Stanley Cups. But McDavid is now on the precipice of having the best two non-Gretzky seasons by Z-score, as he chases a first Cup of his own.
Wherever McDavid’s 2022-23 campaign ends up on list, it is fair to say he has entered rarified air as the first player in a quarter century worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as Gretzky.
