Wayne Gretzky Averaged Nearly 2 Points Per Game In Post-season

Published on April 29th, 2024 5:31 pm EST
Written By: Dave Manuel


The NHL post-season.

This is when the best teams play each other in gruelling, long series.

This is when a team's best defender will usually match up with the opponent's best offensive player.

This is when teams are throwing out everything but the kitchen sink to try and win the Stanley Cup.

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Everybody knows about Wayne Gretzky's tremendous regular season statistics, but his post-season stats are just as impressive, if not more so.

Over the course of his illustrious career, Wayne Gretzky notched 382 points in 208 post-season games.

Of this total, Gretzky scored 122 goals and added 260 assists.

Gretzky was a career +91 in post-season games.

Gretzky scored 35 powerplay goals during his post-season games, as well as 12 short-handed goals and 4 overtime-winning goals.

When the stakes were the highest, Gretzky continued to play a majestic brand of hockey.

When Gretzky faced all of the toughest match-ups, he continued to produce at a nearly 2 point per game pace, and this includes all of his games in Edmonton, Los Angeles, St. Louis and New York.

This includes all of the post-season games that Gretzky played with a bad back, which occurred in 1991 and nearly cost him his career.

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The player who trails Gretzky on the list is Mark Messier.

Despite playing in 28 more post-season games than Gretzky, Messier finished with nearly 100 less points, as he closed his career with a total of 295 post-season points.

The top five list looks like this:

Wayne Gretzky, 382 points
Mark Messier, 295 points
Jari Kurri, 233 points
Glenn Anderson, 214 points
Sidney Crosby, 201 points

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Jaromir Jagr, who is one of the most skilled players in NHL history (and who played for much of his career with Mario Lemieux), played the same number of post-season games as Wayne Gretzky, and finished with 181 less points.

Gretzky was an absolute machine, even in the post-season.