NHL: Who is the greatest goal scorer of their generation?

The NHL has seen many great goal scorers over the course of time. Each generation has had their dominant scorer that everyone feared. We will now settle the debate of who was best.

The 2018-19 NHL season has started off with an explosion of goals scored by the league’s elite snipers. It has made many start thinking, who was the greatest goal scorer who ever played the great game of hockey?

We will take an adventure through time, starting with the original days of the NHL through until today, and we will take a look at the best goal scorers over the years. Think of it as holding a title belt in wrestling or MMA. You’re king until someone knocks you off the top of the mountain.

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Now, before you shout out “Gretzky! It was Gretzky! Gotta be Gretzky!”, there are more factors than just goal totals in their career that we need to take into account.

Firstly, we have to think about how easy or difficult goal scoring was at their time. The art of goal scoring has changed drastically over time, with new techniques and technology being discovered and perfected. Goal scoring was different in the days of wooden flat-bladed sticks and goalies that weren’t allowed to dive on the ice. Then, banana-blade sticks came into existence and goalies eventually developed the butterfly technique. Things change.

Secondly, each of the players we will visit through has had their stranglehold over the NHL scoring crown over a period of time. It’s one thing to be the king of scoring for a year or two, but if that player can keep the crown for a longer period of time, it’s all the more impressive.

Thirdly, we will look at how many scoring titles each player has won through their time. It’s no use being the king of scoring if you can’t lead the league in scoring over and over again. So the more scoring titles the player had during his reign of dominance, the better consideration they’d get for the all-time throne.

Lastly, in order to quantify how many goals each player was good for during the seasons they played in, we have to take into account how many goals they scored per game they could have played, not just games they played in. It’d be very difficult to be a threat to score if you’re in the press box watching.

Once we go through all the options, we can come to our conclusion. This research was done scientifically with math. Which means everything I say here is gospel.

Now that we’ve set up our criteria, let’s go back 101 years to the very beginning of the NHL, to December 19, 1917, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The Ottawa Senators (not who you think) hosted the Montreal Canadiens at Dey’s Arena, and Montreal took the game by a 7-4 margin. The Canadiens had five of their goals scored by our first featured player, Joe Malone.