Sidney Crosby turned 39 this week with 654 goals and 1,761 points on the ledger, and we’ve spent most of the years since Pittsburgh’s back-to-back Cups arguing about where that puts him all time without settling on much beyond vibes. He’s 96 goals from 750. He’s 239 points from 2,000. The second number is the one worth sitting with, because exactly one player in NHL history has ever reached it.
That’s Wayne Gretzky, at 2,857, and nobody’s ever come within shouting distance — Jaromir Jagr is the closest anyone’s gotten, and he’s still 79 points short at 1,921. Crosby getting to 2,000 wouldn’t just be a nice round number for a highlight package. It would put his name in a sentence that has belonged to exactly one person for as long as the league has kept score, and arithmetic doesn’t care about the era adjustments the usual debate runs on.
The goals side works the same way, just with more company. Four players have ever scored 750 in an NHL career. Ovechkin is still piling them on during Alex Ovechkin’s chase to the all-time goals record and sits at 929. Gretzky finished at 894, Howe at 801, Jagr at 766. Crosby would be the fifth name on that list. (For context: getting from 654 to 750 in your late 30s isn’t a formality — it’s 96 goals over however many seasons he has left, at a rate that’s slowed but hasn’t collapsed.) Five players in over a century of NHL hockey isn’t a crowded room, but it’s not the club of one that the points number would put him in either.
What makes this more than a longevity story is what’s happening year to year, not just cumulatively. Crosby broke Gretzky’s NHL record for most point-per-game seasons back in 2024-25, his 20th, topping a mark Gretzky had held since he retired. He didn’t stop there. He clinched a 21st consecutive point-per-game season in 2025-26 on his 70th point of the year, and the Penguins made sure everyone saw it:
https://twitter.com/PenguinsPR/status/2040877585442173091
That’s a 39-year-old still producing at the rate that got him here in the first place, not a compiler padding a résumé on the way out. (Jagr, for what it’s worth, is still the runner-up nobody brings up in these conversations.)
Crosby’s in the final year of a two-year, $17.4 million deal, and he’s said this isn’t likely to be it — he’d rather keep signing year to year at this stage than lock into one big number. I used to compile research notes for TV analysts who’d cite a player’s cap figure with none of the context behind it, and this is the kind of detail that context actually explains: a year-to-year structure from a franchise cornerstone isn’t a farewell tour, it’s a guy leaving the door open. That matters for the countdown. Ninety-six goals and 239 points is a two-or-three-year proposition at his recent pace, not a single-season sprint, and a player who won’t commit to retiring isn’t racing a clock he’s already decided to stop.
He’s already seventh all time in points, and 39 more, call it 1,800, would move him past Ron Francis and Marcel Dionne into fifth. At home, the accounting is even more settled. Crosby passed Mario Lemieux for the Penguins’ all-time scoring record back in December, and he’s 36 goals from clearing Lemieux’s franchise record of 690 too. The team he plays for doesn’t have much left to argue about. The league still does.
Add three Stanley Cups and back-to-back Conn Smythes in 2016 and 2017, and Crosby already cleared the bar that usually settles these conversations early for everybody else. He didn’t need this season’s numbers to be a Hall of Famer. What he needs them for is the specific, uncomfortable argument that puts him ahead of other guys who also won a lot: the top-three-ever conversation, the one that includes Gretzky, Howe, Orr, Lemieux, and three or four other names depending on who’s arguing.
The obvious pushback is that he might not get there. He’s 39, he’s not playing the minutes he played at 25, and one bad hip or one lost season turns 96 goals into a much longer proposition than it looks on paper right now. That’s fair, and it’s also true of just about every counting-stat chase in league history. Howe played into his 50s across two leagues to build his goal total, and nobody discounts 801 for the mileage it took to get there. Crosby isn’t being asked to sprint. He’s being asked for two or three more seasons that look roughly like his last one, and a player who just set a point-per-game consistency record isn’t the guy you bet against on pace alone.
I think the top-three case is closer than the last decade of debate has made it sound. Strip out style and era and you’re left with production at an all-time rate that hasn’t stopped, a trophy case that’s already full, and two thresholds that would put Crosby’s name next to Gretzky’s specifically, not generally. Getting to 750 goals puts him in flattering company, one of five ever. Getting to 2,000 points puts him in a club of two: him and Gretzky, nobody else in league history. Once that happens, this stops being a debate people have with vibes and turns into a fact people have to work around.
Crosby opens his 22nd NHL season in October still holding the pace, still holding the C, and still adding to a résumé most players finish building a decade earlier than this. Whether he clears 750 and 2,000 is a two-or-three-season watch, not a guarantee, but it’s the most interesting one working through the rest of our NHL coverage right now, and it’ll stay interesting until the math closes the case or it doesn’t.
