Mike Bossy.....Playmaker

I was recently perusing Hockey-reference.com , as I often do, and found something somewhat surprising, at least to me. I was looking at the Career Leaders in Assists per Game, and saw that the list was populated by player’s you’d expect, except one. Sitting there with the 16th highest A/GP in NHL history was super sniper Mike Bossy. We all know he was a goal scorer, one of the greatest of all-time. In fact his 0.762 Goals per Game is THE highest in NHL history, but a playmaker too?
Bossy ranks right behind Joe Sakic at 0.735 A/GP and ahead of such renowned playmakers, Ray Bourque, Denis Savard, Ron Francis, Bryan Trottier and Gil Perreault. Of course, Bossy’s high averages of goals and assists per game can be somewhat attributed to his career being cut short in his prime. He had no downside to his career to bring his averages down. To account for this, I looked at each players’ top three consecutive year period of assists per game. That chart follows.

We see, Bossy does in fact drop a bit in the ratings but still ranks 24th all-time. He is still one of only 29 players in NHL history to average over 0.90 A/GP over a three year period (only four have done that for an entire career). Ten men have averaged over an assist/game for three straight seasons, including Adam Oates, perhaps surprisingly at third. Oates had 1.18 A/GP feeding Brett Hull from 90/91 through 92/93. Joe Thornton takes sixth on the list with his three seasons prior to the current one. Elmer Lach, who had Rocket Richard as a trigger man in the mid ‘40s just missed averaging an assist per match, as did Doug Gilmour in the early ‘90s.