Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images
From a team perspective, Pittsburgh Penguins icon Sidney Crosby has had a crummy year.
But the 37-year-old is about to reach an important milestone, as his next NHL regular-season goal will be the 600th of his Hockey Hall of Fame career. He has a chance to get it during Friday night’s game against the Winnipeg Jets or Saturday against the Utah Hockey Club.
That brings to mind intriguing questions – namely, does Crosby get enough credit as a goal-scorer? And if Crosby hadn’t been injured early in his NHL days or dealt with multiple shortened campaigns, how much higher up the list of all-time goal-scorers would he be right now?
Let’s deal with the first question first. Crosby hasn’t got the reputation of, say, Washington Capitals star Alexander Ovechkin, who likely will break the all-time goal record late this season or the next.
The hype around Ovechkin’s pursuit of Wayne Gretzky’s record total of 894 goals has overshadowed Crosby’s goal-scoring, but it shouldn’t.
Crosby currently has seven goals in 21 games this season. If he keeps that pace up, Crosby will finish the season with 27 goals. It would be his lowest total in a season since the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 campaign, but it would vault him up the all-time NHL goal-scorers list with 619 tallies.
Crosby could push past Jari Kurri (601 goals), Dino Ciccarelli (608) and Bobby Hull (610) for 18th place overall this season. He would be within range of moving past Jarome Iginla and Joe Sakic’s 625 goals each early next season, and he could also pass Dave Andreychuk’s 640 goals and Brendan Shanahan’s 656 goals later in the campaign.
If Crosby’s goal rate remained at, let’s say, 30 goals per season for the next two seasons after the current campaign – the final two seasons of what could be his last NHL contract – Crosby would move close to Mike Gartner (708 goals) for eighth all-time. So he’d be a top-10 career goal-scorer.
Now, onto that second question – the X-factor of what Crosby could’ve done in the goals department if he hadn’t missed a lot of time early in his career.
Crosby was sidelined for 101 games in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons because of head and neck injuries. He also missed at least 34 games due to the 2012-13 NHL lockout, 41 games in 2019-20 due to an injury and the COVID-19 pandemic, 26 games in 2020-21 due to the 56-game season, so we’re talking 202 games lost to him for one reason or another.
His career goals-per-game rate is about 0.46. If we multiply that by 202 games, that would mean he could’ve had another 93 goals in his career.
If we only look at the injuries from earlier in his career, he could’ve had 46 more goals, and that doesn’t even take into account the 0.78 goals per game he averaged before his concussion in 2010-11, which robbed a potential 60-goal season for him.
Let’s put it all together then. He’s on pace for 619 goals after this season, and he could’ve been at between 665 and 712 goals had he stayed healthy, didn’t play in shortened seasons and scored at his career pace. If he gets 30 goals in each of the next two seasons, that could put him at between 725 and 772 goals by 2026-27.
Crosby could have had a chance to pass Jaromir Jagr’s 766 goals for fourth-place all-time. And Crosby would’ve done it in far fewer games than the 1,733 games that Jagr needed to get to fourth overall.
Crosby is heralded as one of the game’s greatest players, largely because of his all-around elite talents. He’s a first-rate points-producer, but his skill as a defender is also great, so it’s understandable why his goal-scoring might not get the hype it truly deserves. Even for those who do recognize his scoring ability, he probably deserves even more recognition.
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