I needed a day to start a blog, and as a Wayne Gretzky fan, I think January 7 is a good day. If Wayne Gretzky had stopped playing on January 7, 1984, he would have finished the 1983-84 NHL season with enough points to win the scoring title outright.
On that day Gretzky picked up his 50th goal (in his 42nd game) to complete a hat trick against the Hartford Whalers. That gave him 50 goals, 79 assists and 129 points on the season. Paul Coffey finished the season in second place with 126 points. Technically, Gretzky could have won the Art Ross Trophy on a tiebreaker after January 4, but we'll go with this since I missed that day.
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He was also on game 42 of a 51-game point streak. |
To honour Wayne Gretzky's accomplishment from 27 years ago, here is what I believe to be a complete game-by-game points breakdown of every game Gretzky played against Mario Lemieux. (There are two other games listed further below where Mario may or may not have played.) If anyone has corrections or more information, I welcome your comments:
Mario Lemieux: One on One with The Great One
| Mario Lemieux | Wayne Gretzky | ||||||||
| Date | Result | G | A | PTS | +/- | G | A | PTS | +/- |
| November 6, 1984 | Oilers 3 @ Pens 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ||||
| January 12, 1985 | Oilers 3 @ Pens 4 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | ||||
| January 26, 1985 | Pens 3 @ Oilers 6 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 4 | |||
| January 22, 1986 | Pens 7 @ Oilers 4 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | |||
| March 7, 1986 | Pens 3 @ Oilers 5 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | ||||
| March 26, 1986 | Oilers 8 @ Pens 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | |||
| January 24, 1987 | Pens 2 @ Oilers 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | |||
| November 20, 1987 | Pens 1 @ Oilers 4 | 1 | 1 | -2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | ||
| February 19, 1988 | Pens 3 @ Oilers 7 | 1 | 1 | Even | 0 | Even | |||
| November 12, 1988 | Pens 2 @ Kings 7 | 1 | 1 | 2 | -3 | 1 | 1 | Even | |
| March 7, 1989 | Pens 2 @ Kings 3 (OT) | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Even | |
| October 31, 1989 | Kings 8 @ Pens 4 | 2 | 2 | -3 | 3 | 3 | 6 | 4 | |
| February 10, 1990 | Kings 6 @ Pens 7 | 1 | 1 | -1 | 1 | 1 | Even | ||
| February 26, 1991 | Pens 2 @ Kings 8 | 1 | 1 | -3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | ||
| March 7, 1991 | Kings 2 @ Pens 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 1 | |
| March 7, 1992 | Pens 3 @ Kings 5 | 1 | 1 | -2 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | |
| March 11, 1993 | Kings 3 @ Pens 4 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Even |
| November 6, 1993 | Pens 3 @ Kings 8 | 2 | 2 | -2 | 4 | 4 | 3 | ||
| March 26, 1996 | Blues 4 @ Pens 8 | 5 | 2 | 7 | 3 | 1 | 1 | -2 | |
| October 16, 1996 | Pens 1 @ NYR 8 | 0 | -2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | |||
| November 16, 1996 | NYR 8 @ Pens 3 | 1 | 1 | -1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Even | |
| January 25, 1997 | NYR 7 @ Pens 4 | 0 | -2 | 3 | 3 | 1 | |||
| March 24, 1997 | Pens 0 @ NYR 3 | 0 | -1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | ||
| Total | 11 | 27 | 38 | 15 | 41 | 56 | |||
| Oilers-era (9 games) | 3 | 10 | 13 | 7 | 15 | 22 | |||
| Post-Oilers (14 games) | 8 | 17 | 25 | -11 | 8 | 26 | 34 | 15 | |
Wayne Gretzky's teams went 17-5-1 (.761) against the Pittsburgh Penguins in games where Gretzky and Mario Lemieux were both playing.
Through 23 head-to-head games The Great One has a four-goal lead, and a massive lead in assists (14), to give him 18 more points in that span. He also has more assists than Mario has points.
Even after leaving the Edmonton Oilers, Gretzky's head-to-head goal total matches Mario, and he narrowly manages to have more assists than Lemieux has points.
Plus/Minus totals aren't available at hockey-reference.com for games before the 1987-88 season, so the table above only calculates the Plus/Minus totals for Kings/Blues/Rangers vs Penguins games. Gretzky is a healthy +15 through 14 post-Oilers games, while Mario is at -11. Counting the two Oilers games where data is available would drop Lemieux to a minus-13 and lift Gretzky to +16.
I would prefer to interpret this data to mean that Gretzky and Lemieux welcomed the challenge of playing against each other and performed brilliantly as a result. I would also like to point out that Lemieux's 11-27-38 line through 23 games (or maybe 25 games, see below) is actually very good. It would be good enough to outscore most opponents, and Mario would likely be better than -13 against other opponents who were less gifted offensively.
Against this particular opponent however, Mario Lemieux doesn't do all that well, being beaten in goals, assists and points and a having a Plus/Minus rating that makes him look like a major defensive liability in 5-on-5 situations.
In head-to-head competition, it would appear that 99 > 66. And it's not very close either. In 23 games Gretzky had a .761 winning percentage, more goals, more assists, more points, more assists than Lemieux has points, and a far superior Plus/Minus rating.
The Other Two Games
Finding the results from older games was fairly easy with these two - they usually managed to score. There are two Oilers-Penguins games where it is unclear whether or not Lemieux played because he doesn't show up in the boxscore. The stats for these two games are as follows:
| Mario Lemieux | Wayne Gretzky | ||||||||
| G | A | PTS | +/- | G | A | PTS | +/- | ||
| December 5, 1986 | Oilers 4 @ Pens 2 | 0 | 3 | 3 | |||||
| February 24, 1987 | Oilers 2 @ Pens 5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | |||||
At this point I would like to say that for games before the 87-88 season, the information used herein was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by The Hockey Summary Project. For more information about the Hockey Summary Project please visit: http://hsp.flyershistory.com/. Go there and find boxscores. It's fun.
HSP shows that Mario played in the game before the December 5 game (November 30) and the game after (December 6), but that doesn't necessarily mean he played on December 5. He played February 26, but doesn't show up in the boxscores immediately prior to the February 24 game. If Lemieux played these games, it wouldn't impact his point total, and would boost Gretzky's assists total to 45 and point total to 60. This would give Gretzky a 22 point lead over Mario in 25 games, and changes Gretzky's team record to 18-6-1 (.740).
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