Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Statistics and athletic sports have always had a strong connection that many
critics, fans and statisticians utilize to determine how successful a team or an individual
player might be over an entire season or even throughout one’s career. The success of a
player or team is often characterized by investigating the consistency that has been shown
throughout the season or career, which has led to more investigation of the streakiness of
players. Studies have been done to examine great streaks, such as Joe DiMaggio’s 56
game hitting streak or Tiger Woods’ 142 consecutive cuts made streak, but what about
the outstanding streak that occurred during the 1983-1984 NHL season? Wayne Gretzky,
of the Edmonton Oilers, managed to showcase just how elite he was as a playmaker
during that season. Gretzky produced a remarkable 51-game point streak, in which he
recorded at least one goal or point in 51 consecutive games; a streak that has not received
the recognition that it deserves. Using game-by-game data for the entire 1983-1984 NHL
season for all players, the research looks at not only the evaluation of Gretzky’s streak,
but also compares his production and streak to the remainder of the league. Gretzky
demonstrated why he is one of the greatest players to ever step foot on the ice, and his
elite status is shown throughout this analysis. Comparing Gretzky’s streak to that of
DiMaggio’s was shown to be a little challenging but, some general conclusions were
made based on the comparison of analyses that were performed; but without the proper
statistics being readily available, it is hard to adequately dictate which streak is ultimately
more impressive or more rare.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:IUPUI/oai:scholarworks.iupui.edu:1805/19395 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Ison, Tyler |
| Contributors | Fadel, William, Lourens, Spencer, Zhang, Ying |
| Source Sets | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Attribution 3.0 United States, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ |
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