It’s been a little over three weeks since sports started shutting down, and this past weekend would have been the 2019-20 NHL regular season would have concluded. Instead, we’re left wondering if we’ve seen the last of the 2019-20 sports seasons and if it’s time to start looking ahead to next season.
Since every team in the league had somewhere from 11-14 games left on the calendar, hockey fans missed out on three weeks worth of action while some players had to put their chase for certain milestones on hold for the unforeseen future.
800 points
Corey Perry, Justin Williams, Joe Pavelski and Zach Parise were all chasing down their 800th career NHL point this season as Perry and Williams are both sitting at 797 career points, while Parise and Pavelski are each eight points away from the mark. However, considering Williams stepped away from the game last summer and returned to the Hurricanes in January, it makes us wonder if he’s going to hang up the skates for good this summer while sitting just three points away from 800.
700 points
The Philadelphia Flyers were one of the hotter teams in the league in the second half of the season and Jakub Voracek, the team’s assists leader, was most likely going to hit the mark. Instead, he sits five points shy of the 700-point mark, while Brent Burns is just six points back of becoming the 26th defenceman to record 700 career NHL points.
500 points
Things didn’t work out as planned for Wayne Simmonds and the New Jersey Devils, which led to the 31-year-old getting traded at the deadline. While it hasn’t been a standout year for Simmonds, he’s just one point away from 500 for his career.
700 assists
Ryan Getzlaf is already the Anaheim Ducks’ all-time leader in assists and he’s not far off of Teemu Selanne’s franchise-best 988 points, but he’s also not far off of becoming the 54th player in NHL history to record 700 career assists. Just 9 helpers shy of the mark, you can count on seeing Getzlaf hitting the 700-assists plateau next year.
600 assists
Hopefully we haven’t seen the last of Jason Spezza because he’s just one assist shy of 600 for his career. He might not be the same first-line playmaker he once was, but at 36-years-old he proved he can still hang at the highest level a majority of the time.
300 goals
Dustin Brown isn’t the same player he once was, but over the past two and a half seasons he’s shown everyone he’s got plenty of hockey left in his tank. With 17 goals on the season, the 35-year-old is one goal away from 300 career goals.
Brad Marchand needed to score 8 goals in the remaining 12 regular season games to hit the 300-goal mark, but with the way he and David Pastrnak were playing this season there’s a possibility he could have made that happen.
200 goals
Cam Atkinson, Nick Foligno, Gabriel Landeskog, Kyle Okposo, Travis Zajac, Ryan O’Reilly and Sean Monahan were all chasing down their 200th career goal in the final stretch of the season. Atkinson and Landeskog are both two goals away, but Atkinson was on the IR so we probably had to wait for him to hit the mark next season. Foligno and Okposo are both four goals back, O’Reilly and Zajac are five goals back, while Monahan is six goals back.
1,000 games
Travis Zajac had to put two milestones on hold as he was also just nine games away from his 1,000th career game. Shea Weber is also closing in on the milestone, as he’s just 10 games away from suiting up for his 1,000th game.
900 games
It’s not as flashy at 1,000 games played, but 900 games in the NHL is something to be very proud of. Frans Nielsen needs just four more games for 900, while, Mark Giordano is seven games back and Marc Staal is eight games back.
350 wins
Carey Price is one of the greatest goalies of our generation and the Montreal Canadiens netminder needed just two more wins to hit 350 on his career. Once he secures win No. 350 he’ll become just the 23rd goalie to hit the mark.
