[Long_Long_Name]

Originally Posted by johnnyshaka

Lemieux was never as media savy as Gretzky was, and it was a knock on him early on in his career. He also had a rep of being somewhat of a whiner, not that he didn't have a reason to complain, as he was often a victim of constant clutching and grabbing.

You're right in saying that Lemieux was never as media savvy as Gretzky. However, many journalists would say that Lemieux was as classy as they get, that he never complained about anything, despite having multiple reasons to. But that has nothing to do with who is the best.

LLN...I'll preface this by saying that I'm a HUGE Gretzky fan, so there is some obvious bias here, but at the same time, I think I'd be part of the majority when if I said that Gretzky was the better player.

When I was a kid, my favorite player was Wayne Gretzky. I had his posters all over my walls. However, it appears to me that Mario Lemieux is a better hockey player, so I won't let my personal preferences interfere with that, or else I'll say that Marquis Grissom and Kirk Rueter are the best baseball players of the past 15 years.

You're problably also right when you say that most people would claim Gretzky is better than Lemieux. If they can back it up with some sort of statistical analysis that beats mine, I'll have no problem with it, and I'll change my opinion. However, when the reasons that make him better are durability and trophies, or simply "he looked better on the ice", it's not that serious a position, and I have a hard time respecting it. Popular opinion is not always right - I'm sure that if you asked Yankees fan whether Jeter or Rodriguez is the better player, Jeter would get a much bigger share than he deserves.

Destroying the "myth" that Gretzky is better is partly why I wrote that article. I'd very like to hear an argument demonstrating that Gretzky is a better player - however, nothing appears to me as such, and the reasons that make Gretzky a better candidate for "best player ever" in most people's mind are rather shallow, or so it appears to me.

Before either of these guys ever stepped onto the ice, if I were asked which guy I wanted on my team, I'd obviously say Lemieux. He is a physical specimen, especially compared to Gretzky. Lemieux is bigger, stronger, and faster than Gretzky...no doubt about it. Now, with that said, given what God gave them to work with...Gretzky far exceeded what anybody thought he could do and I'd probably say that Lemieux never reached his full potential. To me, that is why Gretzky is the better hockey player. Sure, it is strictly my opinion, but, to me, just seems like common sense.

Lemieux was bigger than Gretzky, but that wasn't realy part of my argumentation. I did bring their physical attributes up, but that wasn't an argument - IIRC, I write that if anything, Mario's size would make it seem as thouh he'd be more durable.

Let's take Major League Baseball. Let's pretend that next season, the Yankees win the AL East by 2 games over the Devil Rays. Well, the Devil Rays far exceeded all the expectations people had in them, and the Yankees were somewhat weaker than people thought they would be. However, even in such a situation, even if the Yanks were disappointing and the Devil Rays were playing well above expectations... the Yankees were still the better team (assuming that wins reflect a team's performance). You can like the Devil Rays more, you can claim that they did more than were expected against an opponent that would seem to be a prime candidate to crush them, you can claim they did better than they should have, but the Yankees were still the better team. Mario Lemieux might've been much bigger than Gretzky, he might've not played to his full potential (which is a scary prospect), and Gretzky might not have had the same physical size as Lemieux (which might have advantaged him, considering he had a killer on his team to protect him while people just wailed away at Lemieux), he might've surpassed what one can expect from a "smaller" player, but despite that, his performance on the ice wasn't as good as Lemieux's, in absolute terms. I tried to make abstraction of all intangibles and impressions to make an factual analysis.

One other issue I'd like to raise is how much better Gretzky was compared to his competition during his peak years. Have a look at the leaderboards for those crazy 6 or 7 years and you'll notice that he outscored the rest of the league by about 70 or 80 points each year...Lemieux never dominated the league like that. Ok, I understand that during some of Lemieux's peak seasons he was hurt and that he probably would've outscored his opponents by similar margins, but the fact remains that he DIDN'T. Durability has to count for something. Afterall, hockey is a team sport and you can't help your team if you're up in the pressbox more often than not.

Durability, as Mats stated, is something I tried to discount. It does count for something - and that's something I try my hardest to eliminate, as it has absolutely no place in finding out who the best player was. If anything, durability is probably the biggest obstacle to evaluating who was the best of the two. As I said before, many times, Gretzky did play longer, and that is totally relevent to evaluating who had the best career - and Gretzky completely kills Lemieux in that regard. However, that's not what I was trying to demonstrate. I was trying to find out who, when he played, was the best. I'm not discounting Gretzky's domination during the early 80's - he absolutely crushed his opposition during these years, and my father just can't get enough of telling me how they'd systematically remove him from hockey pools in these years. Gretzky was a great player, that's for sure, but if we era-adjust (which diminishes the margins during Gretzky's years), only one of Gretzky's early 80's seasons were as good as Lemieux's 3 best seasons in terms of PPG - and only one of these three seasons showed Lemieux missing a significant amount of games (he played 59). Domination over the second-ranked player does have some value, but not as much as domination over the entire league.

Also, in terms of durability... Lemieux's decline only came at age 40, while Gretzky started to fall in his late 20's. It's something worth considering if you take durability into account, which I don't.