6 NHL stars who could overtake Alex Ovechkin as league’s top scorer

For four of the past five seasons, Alex Ovechkin led the NHL in goals. Just a couple of weeks into the 2017-18 season, he’s again atop the leaderboard with nine tallies in six games. Only two players in the league have scored seven or more goals this season, a total that the Capitals winger reached after two games.

This is nothing new for Ovechkin, whose place as the premier goal scorer in hockey has been difficult to pry from his hands. Aside from a relative down year of 33 goals in 82 games last season, which was tied for 13th in the league, he’s consistently been the guy everyone else is chasing.

Since the start of his rookie season, Ovechkin has 182 more goals than anyone else. Think about that — the difference between Ovechkin and the No. 2 guy (Sidney Crosby) is the same number of goals that Milan Lucic has scored in his entire career.

So naturally it’s an uphill climb for anyone to overtake the Washington star as the Rocket Richard Trophy winner. He’s won more of them than the rest of the league combined since 2008. But as we’ve seen early on this season, there are some big names who could be positioned to score enough to surpass Ovechkin, even if he remains the odds-on favorite to lead the league in goals again.

Here’s a look at a few other top goal scorers who could push Ovechkin for this season’s Rocket Richard.

Kucherov has gotten a lot of attention for becoming the fourth NHL player in the past 30 years to score at least one goal in each of the first six games of a season. He scored twice in the Lightning’s 3-2 win over the Red Wings on Monday to push himself into sole possession of second place on the league’s goal leaderboard.

There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about Kucherov. He scored 40 goals as a 23-year-old last season, plays next to Steven Stamkos, and has seen a consistent uptick in his shot rate over the years. This season, he’s taking a career-high 11.8 shots per 60 minutes, according to Hockey-Reference.

That’s impressive, and while he won’t keep shooting 29.2 percent, it shows that he’s putting enough pucks on net to continue racking up huge numbers. The Rocket Richard race could come down to a pair of Russian wingers.

Seguin leads the NHL in shots on goal (36) even though he’s played in only five games. The 25-year-old center has consistently been one of the NHL’s top volume shooters over the past few years, averaging 11-12 shots per 60 minutes. But he’s at a ridiculous 21 shots per 60 minutes so far in 2017-18.

There are reasons to believe his shot rate will go down — for one, over 70 percent of his attempts are getting on net right now, which is up from a career rate of 57 percent — but it’s at such a high level and he’s got a long enough track record to believe he’ll end up being among the league leaders in this category.

Another factor that could benefit Seguin is playing time. He’s seeing a career-high 20:32 per game so far, which is up over two minutes per game from last season. That’s a lot of extra minutes to earn scoring chances, so unless he’s destined to shoot below 9 percent again, 40-plus goals seems possible for the first time in his career.

Scoring 40 goals as a rookie will get you on lists like this one, and Matthews is off to another strong start with five goals in five games. He’s also posted similar shot rates to last season, so you can see how he might be on his way to another big scoring season.

If there’s any reason for concern with Matthews, it’s that he doesn’t play as much as a lot of other No. 1 centers, at just 17:47 per game. Part of that is a lack of shorthanded minutes, when he wouldn’t be that dangerous offensively anyway, but his playing time doesn’t match up with guys like Seguin and Stamkos.

Still, the Leafs lean heavily on Matthews on the power play and at even strength, and they’re a fast-paced team that tends to win games by racking up goals rather than shut down defense. He’s going to score a lot because Toronto will need it.

The NHL’s No. 2 goal scorer behind Ovechkin over the past three seasons, Tarasenko will be leaned on more than ever by St. Louis as a 25-year-old. He’s already playing a career-high 19:43 per game and that probably won’t change anytime soon for a team that’s battling several injuries.

However, faith in Tarasenko is based more in his track record than what he’s done so far this season. Four goals in six games is quite solid, but he’s generated only 15 shots on goal. Even more concerning, the Blues’ even-strength Corsi with him on the ice is just 39.8 percent, a massive decline from the 52-58 percent range of the previous four seasons.

Maybe that’s just an early season hiccup, but Tarasenko isn’t exactly flush with support playing on a line with an aging Paul Stastny and Vladimir Sobotka, whose career-high is 33 points, or Magnus Paajarvi, who has 23 points in 96 games since 2014. If anything, that could be what limits his production this season.

Let’s bunch these two together because they’re here for obvious reasons. McDavid is the reigning Hart Trophy winner and widely considered one of the top two players in the sport. Crosby is the other guy in that discussion, and he actually led the NHL in goals last season. So it’s fair to say each of these guys has a real shot at a Rocket Richard.

But let’s also lay out the reasons for skepticism here. McDavid, for one, only scored at a pace of 29 goals per 82 games during his first two seasons. That’s not enough to overtake Ovechkin, so he’d need to hit another level in creating and finishing plays for himself. Given that we’re talking about McDavid, that’s not beyond him, but he’s been more of a playmaker than a finisher early in his career.

With Crosby, he’d just need to shoot an unusually high percentage again. Even for the Penguins star, his 17.3 percent success rate last season was nearly 3 percent above his career mark. From 2012-16, he shot 13 percent. Crosby has never been a super high-volume shooter, so his shooting percentages were above 17 percent both times he won the Rocket Richard. That would have to happen again, which is possible, but probably not likely.