Time for some nerdery

I’ve always been a stats guy. In fact, when I was 10 I used to goto Jr. A. games in Olds and take stats on a notepad. Some things never change.

After Jarome Iginla broke Theoren Fleury’s goals record, I took a look at the stats and made note of the fact that Fleury reached his record in a bunch fewer games than Iginla had (791 vs. 847). It made me wonder what the impact of NHL goal scoring trends might’ve had on these two players’ statistics.

So off to the magical internets I went to find some statistics. Using the 1988-89 number of 7.37 goals/game, I standardized Fleury and Iginla’s goals per season to level the playing field, statistically. This is pretty simple and unscientific, but bear with me, it’s just for fun anyways.

Here are the numbers that I came up with (statistics up-to-date through March 12th game):

Based on these stats, if NHL goal scoring were on a consistent pace, Iginla would’ve broken the goal scoring record in the first half of last season, and he would’ve accomplished a noticeably higher goals per game average than Fleury. Not that I want to read too deeply into this or anything. Both Fleury and Iginla have made great contributions to the Flames organization, and will forever be a part of the Flames legacy. Of course, those NHL scoring trends don’t necessarily indicate that individual player scoring would all inflate proportionally, so we can throw the science right out the window.

But hey, that doesn’t make crunching these numbers any less fun, right?