NHL Top Playoff Scorers of All Time

The playoffs in any sport are a time to turn up for your team, and some players do it better than others. In the sport of hockey, it’s impressive to see players skate around and score on tiny nets guarded by a goalie with large pads, but in the NHL it’s even more impressive.

The playoffs in the NHL are as real as it gets, and there are only a few players who exceed the expectations of their teammates to get the job done. In this article, we’ll discuss three of the NHL’s top playoff scorers of all time, specifically what team(s) they played for and how many goals they scored.

3. Jari Kurri – 106 career playoff goals

Starting the list of NHL playoff hotshots is none other than former Oiler and King Jari Kurri. Kurri throughout his career over 17 years had played for five different NHL teams, scoring 601 goals and 797 assists over 1,251 games played. To go along with it all, he’d win five Stanley Cups, so it’s no surprise that he found the net 106 times during the playoffs. Specifically, Kurri’s best playoff season was in 1986-1987, where he netted 21 goals. The Oilers’ right winger goes along with two other contenders who managed to break 100 playoff goals throughout their careers, allowing them membership to an extremely select club.

2. Mark Messier – 109 career playoff goals

Mark Messier is a long-time experienced veteran of hockey, with 25 years of experience in the NHL, playing for the Oilers, Rangers and Canucks during that period. As a six-time Stanley Cup champion, Messier would beat Kurri by a narrow three-goal margin, scoring 109 playoff goals throughout his NHL career. Messier’s best run was for Edmonton in the 1982-1983 season, where he secured 15 goals throughout the playoffs. While the Oilers’ center may have had more years of play than Kurri, scoring 694 goals in 1,193 games is still extremely impressive as only a few have ever pulled off anything close to his goal tallies.

1. Wayne Gretzky – 122 career playoff goals

If you know hockey, you know Wayne Gretzky. The legendary Oilers and Kings center would play 20 seasons in the NHL, scoring 894 goals and earning 1,963 assists for a total of 2,857 career points overall, making him arguably the best hockey player of all time, certainly by statistics. Throughout the NHL playoffs, he’d achieve four Stanley Cup trophies, while scoring a record-high of 122 career goals in the playoffs. His best streak of goalscoring came in the 1986-1987 NHL playoffs where he scored 20 goals, just one less than Kurri’s best. Although, if we look at Gretzky’s regular season goals alone, he’s scored close to 200 more than Messier in his 25 seasons, so it’s not a shocker to see his 122 career playoff goals beat both Kurri’s and Messier’s goal tally record.

Gretzky is a hockey legend for a reason, and we don’t expect this particular record to be broken anytime soon.