In Steve Yzerman’s fourth season as Detroit Red Wings general manager, playoff hopes are as high as they’ve ever been. This is due, in large part, to Yzerman’s effort to address the team’s scoring woes over the offseason.
After the Wings finished 24th out of 32 teams in goals scored, Yzerman traded for forward Klim Kostin at the NHL draft, added forwards J.T. Compher, Christian Fischer and Daniel Sprong and defensemen Shayne Gostisbehere and Justin Holl via free agency, then nabbed forward Alex DeBrincat via a July trade and defenseman Jeff Petry in an August deal. In all, Yzerman added players who combined for 109 goals last season.
The biggest offensive talent of that bunch is DeBrincat, the Farmington Hills product who had 27 goals and 39 assists with Ottawa last season in what was a down year for him. That’s because DeBrincat is a two-time 40-goal scorer, hitting the milestone with the Chicago Blackhawks.
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With that in mind, here are four things to know about the NHL’s 40-goal scorers over the years:
Picking up the pace
Racking up 40 goals isn’t nearly as rare as it was a decade ago — or even five years ago: 19 players did so last season, with 17 doing it during the 2021-22 season. That’s following just six hitting the milestone in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons combined, thanks to COVID-shortened seasons. But even in the previous full season of 2018-19, only 13 NHL’ers scored 40 times or more. DeBrincat, by the way, did it in both 2018-19 and 2021-22 with 41 goals each time.
Last season’s surge in 40-goal campaigns was mostly league-wide, with 14 teams sporting at least one 40-goaler, and four — Colorado (Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen), Edmonton (Leon Draisaitl, Connor McDavid), Florida (Matthew Tkachuk, Carter Verhaeghe) and Toronto (Auston Matthews, William Nylander) — sporting two of them. (For those doing the math, Timo Meier is the 19th player with 40 goals; he split his season between San Jose and New Jersey.)
That total of 19 40-goalers, by the way, is the most for the league since 1993-94, when 23 players reached the mark. (The league record was set in 1987-88, when TWENTY-NINE players had at least 40 goals, in a 21-team league.) The next season, 1994-95, was shortened by a lockout and ended with the New Jersey Devils topping the Red Wings for the Stanley Cup, thanks to their left-wing lock defensive style, which ushered in a nearly three-decade ice age for scoring in the league.
Alex the great
Leave it to a Russian to be impervious to an ice age, we guess: the one constant over the past two decades has been Alex Ovechkin. The Washington Capitals forward’s climb to No. 2 in NHL goals all-time (though not, of course, No. 2 in pro hockey) has been aided by an NHL-record 13 40-goal seasons, including last season’s 42 goals in just 73 games.
That campaign put him one up on Wayne Gretzky, who had 12 40-goalers from 1979-80 to 1990-91 (though that doesn’t include his lone season in the WHA, when The Great One scored 46 times as an 18-year-old with Indianapolis and Edmonton.) Just two other players have double-digit 40-goal seasons: Mario Lemieux and Marcel Dionne, with 10 apiece.
It’s a bit of a scroll on the list of players with the most 40-goal seasons before you get to a Red Wing. Brett Hull had eight … but none of them came in his three seasons in Detroit. Ditto Luc Robitaille in his two seasons — he scored just 41 goals as a Wing, actually. Dino Ciccarelli had seven 40-goal campaigns, but only one as a Wing: 1992-93, when he scored 41 times. Down, down we scroll until we get to … yep, Yzerman, who hit 40 goals in six consecutive seasons: 1987-88 (50), 1988-89 (65), 1989-90 (62), 1990-91 (51), 1991-92 (45) and 1992-93 (58).
Meet the Dead Wings
But since Yzerman (and Ciccarelli) did it in ’92-93, just five Wings have hit the 40-goal mark, for a total of seven seasons, including Ray Sheppard (52 in 1993-94), Sergei Fedorov (56 in 1993-94), Brendan Shanahan (46 in 1996-97, 41 in 1999-2000 and 40 in 2005-06) and Henrik Zetterberg (43 in 2007-08).
The most recent Red Wing with 40 goals in a season, however, did it in his only year wearing the Winged Wheel: Marian Hossa, who had 40 goals in 2008-09, rode the Wings to a loss in the Stanley Cup finals, and then jumped to the Blackhawks (where he won three Cups, but never even scored more than 30 goals in a season).
No Red Wing has even come close to 40 goals since Hossa’s departure, with just five seasons of at least 30 goals for the franchise since then. Dylan Larkin tops the list, with 32-goal runs in 2018-19 and 2022-23. At least the Wings aren’t alone in their 40-goal drought; five other franchises haven’t had a 40-goaler since 2008-09: the Arizona Coyotes, Carolina Hurricanes, Montreal Canadiens, Ottawa Senators and Philadelphia Flyers.
Red, white and goals
Which brings us back to DeBrincat, who’s part of an even more elite group: Americans with multiple 40-goal seasons. Just 15 U.S.-born players have recorded more than one 40-goal campaign, out of the 34 with at least one. (Though that’s not counting Hull, who was born in Canada but opted to play for the U.S. in international competitions.) The list is topped by Missouri-born Pat LaFontaine and New York native Joe Mullen, who had seven 40-goal seasons apiece.
LaFontaine, of course, was born in St. Louis but grew up in Waterford. But even though the Mitten State can’t technically lay claim to LaFontaine, Michigan has still produced five players with 40-goal seasons: DeBrincat; Jimmy Carson (Southfield), who had 55 with the Kings in ’87-88 and 49 with the Oilers in ’88-89, thanks to the Gretzky trade; Kyle Connor (Shelby Township), who had 47 in ’21-22 with the Jets; Ryan Kesler (Livonia), who had 41 with the Canucks in ’10-11; and Mike Modano (Livonia), who had 50 with the Stars in ’93-94.
Despite all that, Michigan isn’t quite the most fertile American ground for 40-goal scorers, as one state has produced nine of the 34, including a full third of the 15 multi-40-goalers: Massachusetts. The Minuteman State is responsible for Keith Tkachuk (four seasons), Jeremy Roenick (four), Kevin Stevens (four), Tony Amonte (three) and Bill Guerin (two), as well as four other players with single 40-goal seasons.
Contact Ryan Ford at rford@freepress.com. Follow him on X (which used to be Twitter, y’know?) @theford.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 4 things to know about Alex DeBrincat, 40-goal scorers & Detroit Red Wings
