What if They Hadn't Gone to the WHA and KHL?

[ScottM]

 

It seems like much of the time, NHL stats are treated as the be all and end all as though there's no hockey played in any other league in the world. Going into this season, if you had asked someone how many goals Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, Jaromir Jagr, and Bobby Hull had, the answers probably would have been 891, 801, 749, and 610. I certainly believe that there is good reason for not including most leagues, though it seems to me that some allowance should be made for leagues that are in competition with the NHL, such as the WHA and KHL. I don't think a goal in one of those leagues should be treated as an absolute equal to an NHL goal, so I decided to do some research on league equivalencies and made an approximation of how many goals, assists, and points Gretzky, Howe, Jagr, and Hull would have if they had not left the NHL.

 

When it came to the equivalencies themselves, the WHA was pretty easy, as all the work has been done here: http://hockeyanalytics.com/Research_files/League_Equivalencies.pdf. The KHL wasn't nearly as easy, however, and I had to fill in some blanks with a best guess to "update" Jagr's stats. I don't have a link to share because what I did find was scattered around the internet. Also, with the KHL, additional adjustments have to be made to account for the lower assist to goal ratio. After some searching, I found some individual year equivalencies that took that into account for the 2008-09, 2013-14, and 2014-15 seasons. Those numbers suggested a relatively steady growth, and I filled in the rest from that. Therefore, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt and not treated as being totally precise, though I definitely feel that they should give a good approximation. Even if slight fluctuations would cause them to be slightly off, those should theoretically cause very little damage to the estimated results. These are my KHL to NHL equivalency rates:

 

2008-09 0.70

2009-10 0.72

2010-11 0.73

2011-12 0.75

2012-13 0.77

2013-14 0.78

2014-15 0.80

 

So, after I did all the calculations, these are the numbers I came up with (note that no era adjustments have been made -- only league adjustments):

 

Gretzky: 935 goals, 2,020 assists, 2,955 points

Howe: 929 goals, 1,296 assists, 2,225 points

Jagr: 819 goals, 1,207 assists, 2,026 points

Hull: 812 goals, 791 assists, 1,602 points

 

I find the increases for Howe and Hull to be particularly telling. If someone were to make the mistake of evaluating them on nothing more than sheer statistics and on top of that gave no weight to their WHA statistics, the story would be quite different than if their WHA years are taken into consideration. Make of all this what you will, but I personally found the results to be very interesting. It really looks like it is a safe assumption that Hull and Jagr could be 800 goal scorers with "full" NHL careers.