this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Probably Wayne Gretzky? I don't even know anything about ice hockey and I know he's supposed to be the most dominant player of any sport. Like he and his brother have the record for highest combined goals of any pair of brothers: 2,857 by Wayne, 4 by Brent. If you take away all his goals, he'd be the highest scoring player of all time on assists alone. There have been 13 times when a player has scored over 100 goals in a season in NHL history: Lemieux (once), Orr (once), and Gretzy (eleven times in a row). He retired last century and still holds 57 records. I'm not gonna keep picking out examples but there's a bunch more facts like this that sound like the old "chuck norris facts" meme but are actually true.
"If you don't know anything about ice hockey why do you have all these facts on hand?" - I remembered seeing this kind of list before so I did a quick Google.
Edit: I'm seeing some different exact figures for some of these, but the general principle stands and I'm not invested enough in hockey facts to nail down which numbers are exactly right.
If outlier status as a sportsman makes the GOATest GOAT, sorry Gretzky, but you're second to the Don. Sir Donald Bradman averaged 99.94 in a 20 year career as a test cricket batsman. This is in a sport where only 4 other people even pass 60, and no other passes 62. Bradman even averaged 56 in a series where the opponents create a now-banned strategy specifically to thwart his dominance.
At more than 50% above number 2, the Don is the GOATest GOAT.
What was the strategy?
It's what was known as "bodyline", or "fast leg theory". In essence, bowling in a way that the ball is bowled at speeds potentially in excess of 140 km/h aimed at the batsman's upper body or head. It makes it very hard to hit the ball, and if you do hit it, it drastically reduces the types of shots you can play and increases the chance that you only get an edge on the ball. So setting a field with a large number of fielders on the leg side (the left side for a right-handed batsman), particularly leg slips (behind and slightly to the leg side, basically forming an arc away from the wicket keeper), to greatly increase the chance of getting them out caught. It also posed a safety risk, especially at the time because safety equipment like helmets were not worn at the time.
There's a 1984 miniseries starring Hugo Weaving as the English captain, if you're interested. I haven't seen it myself, and tbh I'm not sure where if anywhere it's available online, but its reviews seem very good.
The rules were eventually changed to limit the number of bouncers that could be bowled in one over, and to limit the number of fielders behind the batsman on the leg side.
This is true, but every other time you've used the word "goals" in this post it should be "points", points = goals + assists. Every goal has at most two assists, but typically the ratio is around ~1.5 assists for every goal. As you say, Gretzky has the record for goals and then also has more assists than any other player has points, which is ludicrously dominant.
One of the most wild things to me is how boring Gretzky highlights are. If you look at highlight footage of the other generational hockey players - Lemieux, Ovechkin, Crosby, McDavid - these guys are insane athletes who are capable of outmuscling and embarrassing the opposition. Gretzky was not a freak athlete, he just had intuition for where to be on a better level than anyone else ever has. I remember reading that when he was eight he got an exception to play in a league for ten-year-olds and completely tore it up, like five points per game, in spite of being the tiniest kid on the ice every night.
It's not even well documented what he was doing because the NHL typically had only one camera per game in the eighties, the one following the puck, and his dominance came from where he was going when he didn't have the puck.
If you watch hockey, every so often there will be a game where a guy doesn't particularly stand out, but then you look on the scoresheet at the end and realize he got four points. You think I guess that he had a good game tonight. I imagine watching Gretzky was this exact feeling, except then you realize you're fifty games into the season and this is like the thirtieth time this has happened.
Ovechkin is actually in striking distance of breaking the goals record, but 50 goals (42? I don't remember where he ended the season.) is a large number for anyone to hit past 38. It's pretty rare for a player to be good enough to still have a roster spot by that point, let alone score 50 in the remainder of their career. Has anyone besides Howe (in the 1970s) scored over 40 goals after 38?
In any case, I'm hoping he can break it. Ten years ago literally no one thought a major Gretzky record could be even remotely in jeopardy. It was not something anyone would give serious consideration.