Dappleganger said:
True, but he was still a better scorer than anybody else.
Sure, but it's always been a topic I've wanted to dig deeper into. For 4-6 years he scored at a level unheard of in the sport, before or since. Then, while still in what should have been his athletic prime, he was scoring roughly as many goals as someone like Dino Ciccarelli.
It's tough to say it was just a reflection of the time either because this is roughly the time when Brett Hull and Mario Lemieux were having years where they were scoring goals at a rate that was pretty close to Gretzky in those 4-6 years where he was lighting the world on fire.
So did the game shift drastically or did it have something to do with the calibre of players coming into the league or did teams just sort of figure out what Gretzky was doing and were able to stop a lot of it? Anyways, it's just something that's always interested me.