NHL All-Time Points

Wayne Gretzky is the NHL’s all-time regular-season points leader, and the margin is the widest in major North American team sport. Through games of Oct. 27, 2026, Gretzky’s 2,857 career points sit 936 clear of second place, a total he assembled across 20 seasons from 894 goals and 1,963 assists in 1,487 games. The arithmetic that makes the record famous is simple: Gretzky’s assist total alone, 1,963, would still rank first on the all-time points list, ahead of every other player’s combined goals and assists. The rest of the top of the board is a mix of 1980s and 1990s greats and two active players — Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin — who rank seventh and tenth.

The leaderboard

Rank	Player	Points	Team / Years
1	Wayne Gretzky	2,857	EDM/LAK/STL/NYR, 1979–1999
2	Jaromír Jágr	1,921	PIT/WSH and others, 1990–2018
3	Mark Messier	1,887	EDM/NYR/VAN, 1979–2004
4	Gordie Howe	1,850	DET/HFD, 1946–1980
5	Ron Francis	1,798	HFD/PIT/CAR, 1981–2004
6	Marcel Dionne	1,771	DET/LAK/NYR, 1971–1989
7	Sidney Crosby	1,768	Pittsburgh, 2005–present
8	Steve Yzerman	1,755	Detroit, 1983–2006
9	Mario Lemieux	1,723	Pittsburgh, 1984–2006
10	Alex Ovechkin	1,691	Washington, 2005–present
11	Joe Sakic	1,641	QUE/COL, 1988–2009
12	Phil Esposito	1,590	CHI/BOS/NYR, 1963–1981
13	Ray Bourque	1,579	BOS/COL, 1979–2001
14	Joe Thornton	1,539	BOS/SJS, 1997–2022
15	Mark Recchi	1,533	PIT and others, 1988–2011

Per Hockey-Reference, NHL regular-season totals through Oct. 27, 2026.

At a glance

Per Hockey-Reference career points and points-per-game leaderboards, through Oct. 27, 2026.

The chase

No active player is within a thousand points of the record. Sidney Crosby, the leading active scorer with 1,768 points through Oct. 27, 2026, trails Gretzky by 1,089 — a margin wider even than Gretzky’s record 936-point lead over second place. Alex Ovechkin, the all-time goals leader, sits second among active players at 1,691 and ranks tenth overall. To close Crosby’s gap would require roughly 1,089 points; even a sustained 80-point season, a strong year for a veteran, would take more than a decade of uninterrupted production to erase, carrying a player into his 50s.

The structural argument for any future challenge rests on rate rather than remaining mileage. Among active players, Connor McDavid carries the highest career points-per-game figure at 1.556, the third-best in league history behind only Gretzky (1.921) and Lemieux (1.883). But McDavid’s career total stood at 1,254 points through Oct. 27, 2026, meaning even an extraordinary rate maintained deep into his 30s would leave the record at the edge of reach. Hockey-Reference’s active and rate leaderboards are the basis for those standings; neither list projects a player on course to catch Gretzky.

How it’s measured

A point is credited for a goal or an assist, and the NHL awards up to two assists on a single goal, to the one or two most recent teammates who touched the puck before the scorer. Career points are the running sum of a player’s goals and assists across regular-season games; playoff totals are tracked separately and do not appear on this list. Gretzky’s 2,857 is therefore 894 goals plus 1,963 assists, the goals reflecting his finishing and the assists his standing as the most prolific playmaker the league has recorded.

Because totals accumulate across decades, the list is not an apples-to-apples comparison of talent. Scoring environments have swung sharply: the high-event 1980s, when Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers routinely topped 400 goals a season, produced point totals the sport has not approached since. The lower-scoring stretch around the 2004-05 lockout, when clutching and goaltending equipment squeezed offense, suppressed the counting stats of players such as Crosby and Ovechkin in their primes. A point in one era and a point in another were earned against very different leaguewide rates of scoring.

The arguments

The central debate is counting stat versus rate. By raw points Gretzky is first by a historic margin, but by points per game Mario Lemieux, at 1.883, sits within a fraction of Gretzky’s 1.921. Lemieux played 915 games to Gretzky’s 1,487, his career repeatedly interrupted by a back injury and a Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis; supporters of the rate view argue that a healthy Lemieux projected to a similar or higher ceiling, while defenders of the counting record note that durability and longevity are themselves part of what the all-time list is built to reward.

A second argument concerns era adjustment. Analysts who adjust for leaguewide scoring compress the gap between the 1980s totals and modern ones, and some era-adjusted models move players such as Howe and Lemieux up relative to the raw board; the raw figures cited here make no such adjustment and reflect only points as recorded. A third concerns what counts as official. The NHL list excludes the World Hockey Association, the rival league of the 1970s where Gretzky, Howe and others also played; Hockey-Reference tracks NHL and WHA totals separately, and combining them raises several careers — most notably Howe’s — well above their NHL-only figures. The points record as stated throughout this entry is the NHL regular-season total, the figure the league and the reference sites treat as the official mark.

Per Hockey-Reference career and points-per-game leaderboards and Wikipedia's 1,000-point list, through Oct. 27, 2026.

Why it matters

The all-time points list is the single cleanest answer to the oldest question in hockey — who produced the most — and its answer has not changed since 1999, nor seriously threatened to. Ovechkin’s pursuit and capture of the goals record showed that even the game’s most durable marks can fall; the points record, by contrast, has only grown more remote as the sport’s scoring environment moved away from the conditions that produced it. That is why it endures as the reference point for every scoring argument: not merely because Gretzky is first, but because his assists alone would still be first, and no active trajectory on the reference leaderboards points toward the gap ever closing.