Level of Play and Scoring Leaders in Past World Hockey Tournaments

It literally isn't every year that there's a major world hockey tournament featuring the best players from every country. Here's a list of every significant international tournament over the last 40 years:

The "Level" of the tournament indicates how difficult it was for an NHL player to record a point in the tournament relative to his regular season performance in the NHL. This number encompasses many things: a higher level of play, difficulty getting a regular shift, etc. As you can see from the chart, it's difficult to put together a tournament with the 6-8 best teams in the world that's more than 40-50% higher caliber than the NHL as a whole. And when the pool is extended to 12 teams, as it was for the preliminary round of the 2006 Olympics, the level of play drops substantially. At this moment, there are really only seven competitive nations, so it's no surprise adding five more drops the level of play; at the same time, culling the eight best team from that group of 12 improves the level of play in the later stages of the Olympics.

And now for something slightly different…The all-time leaders in top-level international competition. First, games played:

There are very few surprises in the scoring department:

The leaders in penalty minutes are an interesting crew:

Keep in mind that I've only included players who played in the NHL in these top ten tables. I don't believe that any of the old Eastern Bloc stars who never came over to North America cracked these lists, though it's possible some of them could be on the penalties list. (I also didn't include some of the 2- or 3-game series like Rendezvous '87; small sample size…)