When does the average NHL Superstars maximize their Points per Game?

While every NHL player maxes out their talent at different stages of their career and life, it is nonetheless interesting to see when NHL superstars reach their max potential in terms of points per game. Here, I define superstar as averaging 1 point per game or greater in a single season.

Below, all superstars in any given season are graphed for the years 1980 to the past 2012/13 season. With no surprise, the amount of observations diminishes as points per game gets higher, and as the second graph shows, most those observation belong to… you guessed it, Wayne Gretzky (The second is not meant to necessarily compare Gretzky to Crosby in their performance, but to show how they fit in the graph as they are two of the most recognizable players ever).

According to the data, the average superstar reaches their maximum output around the age of 26, which is actually higher than Wayne Gretzky’s at the age of 22 who seeing a steady decline afterwards.

Because of the change in goals scored per game over the last couple of decades, I broke up the data into 3 categories: 1980's, 1990's, and post 2000. What can be seen is that the definition of superstar might be changing over time. Players are not scoring as much now, thus an offensive superstar might average only 0.7 points per game now, compared to over 1.0 in the 1980's or 1990's.

What is also interesting to see is that over the decades, the data is beginning to flatten out. In the 80's the data is very top heavy in the early ages, around 24. In the 90's it is pushed to around 26/26, and lately while it is again at around 26/27, there is no peak like we see in the other 2 graphs, possibly showing that players are not only more even in today's NHL, but that they are performing at their best well into their 30's, a big difference compared to the 1980's.

While not all superstars are the same, it will be interesting to see how the next couple of years treat Crosby. If he stays on course with the league superstar average, next year will be his greatest. If he follows the same course as Gretzky, his best years could be behind him, and of course if he follows the trend of the past decade, he could have many good years ahead of him. This begs the question, is the greatest of a player defined by how well he does in a single or couple of seasons, but by how constant his points per game are above the league average?