Seeing as though it is Valentine's Day I feel like showing love to my personal favorite hockey player of all time, Penguins legend Mario Lemieux. The other day I tweeted out some Mario Lemieux facts and I am also going to share them here.

The reason I started looking up Mario information was because Dan Rosen of NHL.com was tweeting out some Sidney Crosby stuff in honor of his 600th game.

Crosby has the 9th highest point total (825) thru a player's first 600 games in history. The 8 players ahead of him are in the HOF.

Crosby is 137th on the NHL's all-time scoring list, and has the fewest games played among the top 226 scorers in League history.

Crosby is 15th among active players in total points; he's tied for 160th in games played among active players.

In reference to Crosby being 137th on the NHL's all-time scoring list, he is 1,102nd on the all time games played list. That's INSANE.

Obviously impressive stuff for Sid.

Here are some of the Mario facts I dug up.


When Mario Lemieux came out of retirement in the 2000-01season after sitting at home for 3 years he put up 76 points in 43 games played. This extrapolates out to an 82 game pace of 66G 144Pts. This LOWERED his career points per game average, just nuts.

Joe Thornton had 125 points in 2006-07. This is the highest total in the cap era. Sidney Crosby's best was in 2006-07 with 120 points and Evgeni Malkin's was in 2008-09 with 113 points. The year Crosby was on fire before being blindsided by Steckel he was on pace for 64 goals and 132 points, still not as good as Lemieux's 2000-01 season in the middle of the dead puck era.

Lemieux had a career points per game average of 2.00 when he retired. He is the only player to ever to hit the 2.0 barrier. He finished his career with a 1.88 points per game average.

Mario Lemieux is 8th overall on all time points list. He has 1,723 points in only 915 games played. He is only player in top 36 with less than 1,000 games played

When Mario came back at 35 years old it was in dead puck era as mentioned above. He still managed to lead all players in points per game during entirety of his comeback.



His points per game average during dead puck era after taking 3 years off and despite being in his mid to late 30's was 1.35 If you only included stats from his comeback era that would still rank as 6th best points per game average of all time

Lemieux's 1.35 points per game during his comeback era is right behind Sidney Crosby's career points per game average of 1.38. How is that for context?

Mario, simply the best.



****

Sean Bergenheim's agent has officially asked for a trade from the Florida Panthers.

Think it was pretty telling Sean Bergenheim used 'they' when referring to the #FlaPanthers ... he's just waiting on the divorce papers.

— George Richards (@GeorgeRichards) February 14, 2015

A very savvy playoff team is going to acquire him and it will really help out that team's forward depth. I think Pittsburgh is a team that could really benefit from him but the money is just too high right now. Pittsburgh should hope that he gets moved to the Western Conference.

I think he would be a perfect fit in San Jose.

We all know that Brandon Sutter is the obvious candidate to move if the Penguins need cap space because of his 3.3M cap hit. However, it remains to be seen if the Penguins are able and willing to do so. Until money is freed up the Penguins can't get in on any of the Bergenheim-type action.


Domenic Galamini , the creator of the HERO charts, had some interesting tweets last night where he came up with an algorithm that finds the best comparables for certain players. He mentioned Sean Bergenheim, Brandon Sutter, and Beau Bennett and I am going to share those with you because I find them very interesting.

Sean Bergenheim's closest comparables include Bryan Bickell, Marian Hossa, Marian Gaborik, Patrick Maroon and Joe Pavelski.

— Domenic Galamini (@MimicoHero) February 14, 2015

Sean Bergenheim's incomparables include Adam Burish, Manny Malhotra, Corey Tropp, Tanner Glass and Jared Boll.

— Domenic Galamini (@MimicoHero) February 14, 2015

Brandon Sutter (2012-13 to 2014-15)
Most Comparable Forwards: Cody McLeod, Maxim Lapierre, Eric Nystrom, Jordin Tootoo, Brad Malone.

— Domenic Galamini (@MimicoHero) February 14, 2015

Least Comparable Forwards: Patrice Bergeron, Nikita Kucherov, Joe Thornton, Sidney Crosby, Ryan Strome.

— Domenic Galamini (@MimicoHero) February 14, 2015

@PaigeLewisFL Beau Bennett 2012-13 to 2014-15...
Most Comparable Forwards: Eriksson, J.Jokinen, Rackell, Bailey, Brassard

— Domenic Galamini (@MimicoHero) February 14, 2015

@PaigeLewisFL Least Comparable Forwards: McGrattan, Malhotra, Burish, Tropp, Glass.

— Domenic Galamini (@MimicoHero) February 14, 2015

Get Beau away from Sutter and things will be just fine.

Thanks for reading!

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