Jagr nears points milestone, but could have scored even more

When the Florida Panthers visit the Colorado Avalanche on Thursday night, hockey history can be made.

Evergreen forward Jaromir Jagr can draw level with Gordie Howe on the all-time points list at 1,850 with a goal or an assist. With two points, Jagr would overtake Howe and sit behind only Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier in the National Hockey League annals.

Though a 44-year-old Jagr scoring 20 goals this season as his Florida Panthers march toward an improbable Atlantic Division title is a great story, there remains an element of ‘what could have been’ with the Czech legend – namely, where would Jagr’s production totals be had he not spent three seasons in the Kontinental Hockey League and lost another season and a half to work stoppages?

While Gretzky and his 2,857 points is an unassailable target, Jagr surely would have surpassed Howe and Messier at this juncture. But trying to figure out where Jagr might have been isn’t exactly easy. We can try to guess, though.

The first work stoppage in Jagr’s career occurred in the 1994-95 season when a lockout limited the season to 48 games. In those 48 games, the 23-year-old Jagr had 32 goals and 38 assists for 70 points – a 1.458-points-per-game pace. If we were to prorate that clip over the course of a full 82 games, that works out to 120 points, which nets out to a gain of 50 for Jagr. That alone would be enough to overtake Messier’s 1,887 career points.

As for the 2004-05 season, lost due to a lockout, and 2008 to 2011 when Jagr plied his trade with Avangard Omsk, there are even more mitigating factors to consider when it comes to trying to estimate what Jagr could have done. Firstly, there’s no NHL data to work with, so it’s not simply a case of looking at PPG and extrapolating. We’re left with looking at his production in Europe, but Jagr wasn’t playing against NHL competition on NHL ice, so there’s nothing remotely concrete here – only supposition.

In 2004-05, Jagr split time between his hometown team, Kladno of the Czech 1 league, and Avangard Omsk, then of the Russian Superleague. In 17 games with Kladno, Jagr tallied 11 goals and 17 assists and he posted totals of 16 goals and 23 assists in 32 games in Russia. With such small sample sizes and significantly inferior competition, Jagr played at a 1.367 PPG clip. If we were to take that ratio and apply it to a regular NHL schedule, that would equal 112 points.

While the competition Jagr faced in the KHL was superior to that of the Czech 1 and RSL, it was still a marked step down from the NHL level, so once again, an apples-to-apples translation of production doesn’t apply, but we’ll continue down this road for argument’s sake.

So in total, we can extrapolate an additional 394 NHL points for Jagr if he played full seasons at the same points-per-game clip he operated on while away. That would put him at 2,243 points, 614 behind Gretzky and 356 ahead of Messier. Again, this doesn’t take into account potential injuries and the weakened level of competition faced by the player outside of the NHL. Also, it doesn’t factor in the possibility that nearly five years away from the premier hockey league in the world has allowed him to prolong a career that might otherwise have wrapped up by this point in time.

Still, it’s easy to assume that Jagr’s place as the league’s second-most prolific scorer in history would already be firmly ensconced had he never left the NHL.