Every now and then, a reader will reach out to me with a question. Sometimes, I already know the answer. Often, I have no idea where I’d even start. But the best kind of questions are the ones that make me think: “Huh, I’m not sure, but I bet it would be fun to find out.”

I got one of those a little while ago from a reader named Bryce. It was nice and simple. Bryce wanted to know which NHL player had scored the most goals in a single season in which their total matched their jersey number.

That’s kind of a cool question. And it’s one that shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out. I couldn’t come up with an answer off the top of my head, but I knew how to find one: just crack open a list of the highest single-season goal totals and work backward.

So that’s what I did. It will be fun, right?

Let’s begin, the way all great journeys do, at the beginning. In this case, that meant a list of every NHL player to ever score 60 goals or more in a season. It’s not a long list, but it’s probably longer than you might think. There have been 39 seasons of 60+ goals in NHL history. Could we find our answer in that list? I wasn’t sure, but it was the right place to start.

Five of those 39 seasons belong to Wayne Gretzky, and we can obviously eliminate him; he wore No. 99 for his entire NHL career, and he never got that many goals in a season. He came reasonably close, topping out at 92 in 1981-82, which still stands as the all-time record and probably always will. But we’re not looking for close here, so Wayne’s not our man.

He does have an impact, though, because his iconic No. 99 encouraged a generation of stars that followed to wear distinctive high numbers of their own. That was a new thing, and it should make our search easier.

Here’s where we run into our first problem: A lot of history’s greatest offensive talents have worn high numbers, but they were too high. Gretzky’s the only player to ever crack the 90-goal plateau, which wipes out the chances of plenty of today’s 90-wearing stars, like Connor McDavid and Steven Stamkos. Eric Lindros and Patrick Kane have posted big goal-scoring years, but neither got anywhere close to the 88 they wore. Alexander Mogilny’s 76 goals in 1992-93 is tied for the fifth-most ever, but he had a long way to go since he was wearing No. 89. Sidney Crosby’s great, but he hasn’t come anywhere near 87.


(Andy Devlin / NHLI via Getty Images)
Brett Hull did, scoring 86 in 1990-91 and hitting the rarified 70-goal mark on two other occasions. But he did that while wearing No. 16, which leads to our second problem: Star forwards who don’t wear really high numbers usually wear relatively low ones. It’s a tradition thing. So right off the bat, we know we can rule out low-numbered stars like Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull (all No. 9), Alexander Ovechkin and Cam Neely (No. 8), Guy Lafleur and Pavel Bure (No. 10). Mike Bossy, Teemu Selanne, Steve Yzerman, Luc Robitaille or Jari Kurri? Sorry. All wore good, solid, traditional numbers that are way too low for what we’re looking for.

There is one player who wore a number in the 70s and had a 70-goal season. But that’s Phil Esposito, and he scored 76 in 1970-71 while wearing No. 7; he didn’t switch to No. 77 until he was traded to the Rangers, so he’s one goal and five years away from being our answer.

After dropping down into the 60s, optimism kicks in because there are two legendary scorers who both wore numbers in this range – Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr, with both showing up on the list of 60-goal scorers. But Jagr topped out at 62 goals in 1995-96, missing his iconic No. 68 by a half-dozen. And while Lemieux had two seasons of 69 goals, one of 70, and one of 85, he never landed on exactly 66. He goes down in history as the highest jersey number to be exceeded by his goal total, but our search for an exact match carries on.

The only other candidates left on our initial list are Lanny McDonald, Dennis Maruk, Steve Shutt and Reggie Leach, and they all came along before higher vanity numbers were a thing. So no, we won’t find our answer in the 60+ club after all. No worries, though – we’ll just have to open up the search to the 50-goal club. And as it turns out, that’s a very big club indeed. Dropping our cutoff down to 50 goals opens the floodgates enough to allow 157 new seasons onto our list, so surely we’ll find our answer here.

The good news is that our list now includes dozens of names that we haven’t seen yet. The bad news is that a glance at some of the guys who had seasons in the high 50s tells us that we’re going to immediately run into the same two problems as before. Marcel Dionne, Tim Kerr and Michel Goulet? Traditional numbers that are too low. Pierre Turgeon or Sergei Fedorov? Too high.

And then, the first sense of doubt creeps in: Wait, what kind of star forward wears a number in the 50s?

There sure aren’t many. Typically, if they hand you a number in the 50s in training camp, it’s because they don’t expect you to stick around long. If you do, you get yourself a real number as soon as possible. What kind of self-respecting sniper is going to wear No. 58?

Not many. But that’s OK because we only need one. And the 50-goal tier is where we start to see some names where I wasn’t sure what number they wore. Charlie Simmer? Craig Simpson? Blaine Stoughton? Rick Kehoe? Nope across the board. John Ogrodnick, Wayne Babych or Pierre Larouche? Negative. I held out some hope for No. 55 since the double-digit thing was in vogue after Gretzky, Lemieux and Lindros. But no such luck, as guys like Keith Primeau, Jason Blake and Eric Daze fall well short, and Mark Scheifele has yet to come close. Dave Andreychuk did wear No. 52, but only for one season in 2000-01 when his 50-goal days were well behind him. Same with Dany Heatley wearing No. 51 for the Ducks.

I had a brief flutter of optimism when I remembered Jonathan Cheechoo’s 56-goal season. Did Cheechoo wear No. 56? It seems like the sort of number he might wear, right? He’d never been an elite goal-scorer before that wild 2005-06 season, so maybe he was still wearing a scrub’s number when he broke through. Alas, he was not. He wore No. 14 that year. Not even close.

By the time I got into the low 50s – Rick Martin? Blaine Stoughton? Ray Freaking Sheppard? – desperation was beginning to set in. I felt like I may have made a terrible mistake.

Lowering our standards to 45 goals adds another 123 players to our list of candidates, which now sits at 319 names. If numbers were assigned at random, we would expect to find at least three matches now, just based on sheer chance.

Does that help? No. Not one damned bit, thanks for asking.

With apologies to Brian Savage, no good forward is out there racking up big numbers wearing No. 49. Danny Briere never got close to 48 goals. Alexander Radulov will have to crack 30 goals before we worry about him hitting 47. David Krejci with 46 goals? Sure, if you combine his two best seasons.


(Jerome Miron / USA TODAY Sports)
We’re getting far enough down the list to run into some more names that are at least worth investigating, like Bill Goldsworthy, Simon Gagne, Geoff Sanderson and Blair MacDonald, but nobody checks out. And for the most part, our list is still cluttered with traditionalists with their boring low numbers. Yes, hello Mark Messier, Mats Sundin, Frank Mahovlich and Denis Savard, you’re not helping us at all here. Neither are you with your fancy look-at-me high numbers, John Tavares, David Pastrnak and Evgeni Malkin. Brendan Shanahan managed to fall into both groups at the same time, wearing four different numbers in the teens and one in the nineties but refusing to help out the team by wearing No. 46 in 1996-97 like a good Mimico boy would.

We even start seeing some defensemen show up on the list, as Paul Coffey and Bobby Orr arrive on the scene. Do you remember your dad regaling you with stories about “numbah forty-six, Bobby Orr?” Yeah, neither do I. This is futile. I regret every life decision I’ve ever made that led to this.

If we drop our criteria down to 40 goals, how many more names will we add? Do I even want to know? I’m not sure I want to know.

Three hundred and three more names. That’s how many.

We are now working with 622 seasons of 40 goals or more, and as Wendel is my witness, if we don’t find our answer here I’m going to go dig a deep hole in my backyard and just lay face-down in it until the rains come.

At this point, I’m starting to see names I don’t even recognize. I think it’s at least possible that hockey-reference is messing with me. Bill Flett? Chuck Lefley? Lowell MacDonald? Are these even real people? Am I a real person? Are you?

But amid the despair, a ray of hope emerges. It comes in the form of a number: 44.

That’s a goal scorer’s number! Granted, not a great one. Not counting Guy Lafleur’s one year as a Ranger, no Hall-of-Fame forward has ever worn No. 44. But that’s OK because we’re 600 names deep in this stupid thing, and we just need 44 goals. We don’t need a Hall-of-Famer. We need a Hall-of-Good-Enough guy. And No. 44 is pretty much the No. 99 of Hall-of-Good-Enough guys.

For example, Todd Bertuzzi. Would you like to hear a story about Todd Bertuzzi? I have a story about Todd Bertuzzi. Back in 2002-03, he had a breakout year with the Vancouver Canucks. Late in the season, on March 23, 2003, he scored a powerplay goal against the Capitals to open the scoring. Not a big deal, you might think, except for one important detail: It was Todd Bertuzzi’s 44th goal of the season. And yes, he was wearing No. 44 that year.

Do you know how he celebrated? By scoring his 45th goal of the season later in that game.

Bertuzzi didn’t finish that season with 44 goals. Neither did another No. 44, Rob Brown, who had 49 in 1988-89. Stephane Richer hit 50 goals twice wearing the number, but never 44 on the nose. But there have been 39 different seasons in NHL history in which a player scored exactly 44 goals. One of them will be our guy. One of them has to be.

Or not. The hockey gods are apparently mocking me now because the list of 44-goal scorers turns out to be clogged with famous names. Patrick Kane. Paul Kariya. Bobby Hull. Jari Kurri. Jaromir. Sidney. Mario. Gordie. None of them wore No. 44. None of them ever would have.

A few guys offer up some hope. Mark Hunter? Mike Rogers? Charlie Simmer? Barry Pederson? Tony Amonte? Those guys at least sound like No. 44-type players, right? Sure they do. But they’re not.

Then comes a disturbing discovery, with the appearance of Phantom Joe Malone, who had 44 goals in just 20 games in the NHL’s very first season over a century ago. He’s our first pre-Original Six name, and here’s the thing about those days: Players had numbers, but the records of who wore what are notoriously bad. Malone is generally listed as wearing No. 7, and wearing a high number like 44 would have been unusual. But could it have happened, and nobody bothered to make a note of it in any record book? We can’t rule it out. And that means we’ve reached the point where our answer to the seemingly simple question of “Who had the most goals while matching their jersey number?” might literally be “It is impossible to know for sure.”

This would have been a good place to stop. Gentle reader, I did not stop.

No, I kept going. And I was rewarded because tucked away on our list of 44-goal scorers was a name that triggered something deep within my last remaining brain cell.

Glen Murray.

He scored 44 goals for Boston in 2002-03.

Glen Murray wore No. 44 for the Bruins.

I know this. I don’t know how, but I know it. I don’t know the color of my wife’s eyes or my own parents’ birthdays. But I damn well know that Glen Murray wore No. 44 for the Bruins. I can picture it.

Or can I? Is this all a hallucination? Did I have an aneurysm back at John Ogrodnick and the rest of this has just been the fading neural oscillations of my flat-lining final moments? Glen Murray did wear No. 44 for the Bruins, right? Please tell me he did.

With trembling hands, I turned to Google. And there it was, just like I’d pictured it. One of the most beautiful damn things I’ve ever seen.

Glen Murray did wear the number 44 for the Bruins.

Specifically, he wore it from 1991 until 1995, when he was traded to the Penguins and later the Kings before returning to Boston six years later. Nick Boynton had taken over the No. 44 in the meantime. And instead of offering it up to the returning veteran as any honorable man would, Boynton kept it for himself.

This means that while Glen Murray did indeed wear No. 44 for the Bruins, he was wearing No. 27 the season he scored 44 goals.

[Quietly staring into the middle distance.]

You know… I don’t… I don’t even know, man.

I hate Bryce, the reader who sent this question in. I hate Nick Boynton. I hate Todd Bertuzzi. I hate Phil Esposito and Dave Andreychuk. I hate the NHL. I hate you. I hate myself.

I checked all 622 of those 40-goal seasons, and I couldn’t find a match. Not one. So I kept going because I didn’t know what else to do.

Henrik Zetterberg wore No. 40 and went into the penultimate game of the 2005-06 season with 39 goals. The Red Wings scored twice late in that game to steal the win, and Zetterberg had the primary assist on both. He did not score. Then he sat out the season finale, finishing one goal shy of 40.

Vincent Lecavalier is another player who wore No. 40, and he did have a 40-goal season. But he didn’t do both at the same time. The scoring came with the Lightning, where he wore No. 4. He didn’t wear No. 40 until he went to the Flyers.

Pavol Demitra wore No. 38 for eight seasons in St. Louis, where he had seasons of 35 goals, and also 36, and also 37, but never 38. Tony Granato scored 39 goals with the Kings, for whom he wore No. 21, but not with the Rangers, for whom he wore No. 39. Chris Drury wore No. 37 with both the Avalanche and the Flames, but not with the Sabres when he scored 37 goals. Vladimir Ruzicka wore No. 38 for Boston and had 38 goals going into the season finale in 1991-92, then scored the Bruins’ final goal of the year to finish with 39.

By the time you get to the end of the list of 36-goal seasons, you’ve seen 970 names. By the time you get to 35, you’re at 1,089. I still couldn’t find a match. Was there one somewhere in there and I’d missed it? Maybe. The thought has absolutely occurred to me, more than once, often in the middle of the night. And I will tell you, with as much honesty as I can muster, that if that’s the case then I absolutely do not want you to tell me about it. I really don’t.

What I do know is that when you scroll through that many names, they all start to blend together. The same players start showing up over and over. And it was somewhere around this point that I began to wonder if the question even had an answer. Maybe we’d stumbled onto some bizarre but immutable law of the hockey universe. Maybe I’d done something terrible to Bryce in a past life and this was his way of taking revenge. Maybe I was destined to click all the way through the list of every season that has ever been in the history of the NHL, sorted from most goals to least, finding nothing at all until I made it down to the zeros and John Davidson and Martin Biron showed up on my doorstep to tell me I’d wasted my life.

I didn’t know anymore. I just wanted it to be over.

It’s Auston Matthews.

Of course it is. The best player on the current edition of my favorite team, from a recent season I watched with my own eyes. Hidden in plain sight. Well played, hockey gods.

Matthews wears No. 34. In 2017-18, he missed 20 games with injuries before returning late in March and went into the season finale sitting at 33 goals. He scored in the first period that night, and despite a handful of solid chances the rest of the way, that was it. Hockey Night in Canada had the call: “A celebration for number 34, who scores number 34.”



Of the 1,201 NHL seasons in which a player has scored 34 goals or more, Matthews is the only one to match his number.

Why? Why did the hockey gods allow that to happen, finally, on the last night of the NHL’s 100th season? Was it supposed to? Was it a glitch? Is something terrible going to happen to Matthews and the Maple Leafs now?

I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I don’t think I’m capable of knowing anything anymore. I’ve processed the names and jersey numbers of 1,201 NHL players and my broken brain does not have room for anything else.

Nobody ever send me a question ever again.Every now and then, a reader will reach out to me with a question. Sometimes, I already know the answer. Often, I have no idea where I’d even start. But the best kind of questions are the ones that make me think: “Huh, I’m not sure, but I bet it would be fun to find out.”

I got one of those a little while ago from a reader named Bryce. It was nice and simple. Bryce wanted to know which NHL player had scored the most goals in a single season in which their total matched their jersey number.

That’s kind of a cool question. And it’s one that shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out. I couldn’t come up with an answer off the top of my head, but I knew how to find one: just crack open a list of the highest single-season goal totals and work backward.

So that’s what I did. It will be fun, right?

Let’s begin, the way all great journeys do, at the beginning. In this case, that meant a list of every NHL player to ever score 60 goals or more in a season. It’s not a long list, but it’s probably longer than you might think. There have been 39 seasons of 60+ goals in NHL history. Could we find our answer in that list? I wasn’t sure, but it was the right place to start.

Five of those 39 seasons belong to Wayne Gretzky, and we can obviously eliminate him; he wore No. 99 for his entire NHL career, and he never got that many goals in a season. He came reasonably close, topping out at 92 in 1981-82, which still stands as the all-time record and probably always will. But we’re not looking for close here, so Wayne’s not our man.

He does have an impact, though, because his iconic No. 99 encouraged a generation of stars that followed to wear distinctive high numbers of their own. That was a new thing, and it should make our search easier.

Here’s where we run into our first problem: A lot of history’s greatest offensive talents have worn high numbers, but they were too high. Gretzky’s the only player to ever crack the 90-goal plateau, which wipes out the chances of plenty of today’s 90-wearing stars, like Connor McDavid and Steven Stamkos. Eric Lindros and Patrick Kane have posted big goal-scoring years, but neither got anywhere close to the 88 they wore. Alexander Mogilny’s 76 goals in 1992-93 is tied for the fifth-most ever, but he had a long way to go since he was wearing No. 89. Sidney Crosby’s great, but he hasn’t come anywhere near 87.


(Andy Devlin / NHLI via Getty Images)
Brett Hull did, scoring 86 in 1990-91 and hitting the rarified 70-goal mark on two other occasions. But he did that while wearing No. 16, which leads to our second problem: Star forwards who don’t wear really high numbers usually wear relatively low ones. It’s a tradition thing. So right off the bat, we know we can rule out low-numbered stars like Rocket Richard and Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull (all No. 9), Alexander Ovechkin and Cam Neely (No. 8), Guy Lafleur and Pavel Bure (No. 10). Mike Bossy, Teemu Selanne, Steve Yzerman, Luc Robitaille or Jari Kurri? Sorry. All wore good, solid, traditional numbers that are way too low for what we’re looking for.

There is one player who wore a number in the 70s and had a 70-goal season. But that’s Phil Esposito, and he scored 76 in 1970-71 while wearing No. 7; he didn’t switch to No. 77 until he was traded to the Rangers, so he’s one goal and five years away from being our answer.

After dropping down into the 60s, optimism kicks in because there are two legendary scorers who both wore numbers in this range – Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr, with both showing up on the list of 60-goal scorers. But Jagr topped out at 62 goals in 1995-96, missing his iconic No. 68 by a half-dozen. And while Lemieux had two seasons of 69 goals, one of 70, and one of 85, he never landed on exactly 66. He goes down in history as the highest jersey number to be exceeded by his goal total, but our search for an exact match carries on.

The only other candidates left on our initial list are Lanny McDonald, Dennis Maruk, Steve Shutt and Reggie Leach, and they all came along before higher vanity numbers were a thing. So no, we won’t find our answer in the 60+ club after all. No worries, though – we’ll just have to open up the search to the 50-goal club. And as it turns out, that’s a very big club indeed. Dropping our cutoff down to 50 goals opens the floodgates enough to allow 157 new seasons onto our list, so surely we’ll find our answer here.

The good news is that our list now includes dozens of names that we haven’t seen yet. The bad news is that a glance at some of the guys who had seasons in the high 50s tells us that we’re going to immediately run into the same two problems as before. Marcel Dionne, Tim Kerr and Michel Goulet? Traditional numbers that are too low. Pierre Turgeon or Sergei Fedorov? Too high.

And then, the first sense of doubt creeps in: Wait, what kind of star forward wears a number in the 50s?

There sure aren’t many. Typically, if they hand you a number in the 50s in training camp, it’s because they don’t expect you to stick around long. If you do, you get yourself a real number as soon as possible. What kind of self-respecting sniper is going to wear No. 58?

Not many. But that’s OK because we only need one. And the 50-goal tier is where we start to see some names where I wasn’t sure what number they wore. Charlie Simmer? Craig Simpson? Blaine Stoughton? Rick Kehoe? Nope across the board. John Ogrodnick, Wayne Babych or Pierre Larouche? Negative. I held out some hope for No. 55 since the double-digit thing was in vogue after Gretzky, Lemieux and Lindros. But no such luck, as guys like Keith Primeau, Jason Blake and Eric Daze fall well short, and Mark Scheifele has yet to come close. Dave Andreychuk did wear No. 52, but only for one season in 2000-01 when his 50-goal days were well behind him. Same with Dany Heatley wearing No. 51 for the Ducks.

I had a brief flutter of optimism when I remembered Jonathan Cheechoo’s 56-goal season. Did Cheechoo wear No. 56? It seems like the sort of number he might wear, right? He’d never been an elite goal-scorer before that wild 2005-06 season, so maybe he was still wearing a scrub’s number when he broke through. Alas, he was not. He wore No. 14 that year. Not even close.

By the time I got into the low 50s – Rick Martin? Blaine Stoughton? Ray Freaking Sheppard? – desperation was beginning to set in. I felt like I may have made a terrible mistake.

Lowering our standards to 45 goals adds another 123 players to our list of candidates, which now sits at 319 names. If numbers were assigned at random, we would expect to find at least three matches now, just based on sheer chance.

Does that help? No. Not one damned bit, thanks for asking.

With apologies to Brian Savage, no good forward is out there racking up big numbers wearing No. 49. Danny Briere never got close to 48 goals. Alexander Radulov will have to crack 30 goals before we worry about him hitting 47. David Krejci with 46 goals? Sure, if you combine his two best seasons.


(Jerome Miron / USA TODAY Sports)
We’re getting far enough down the list to run into some more names that are at least worth investigating, like Bill Goldsworthy, Simon Gagne, Geoff Sanderson and Blair MacDonald, but nobody checks out. And for the most part, our list is still cluttered with traditionalists with their boring low numbers. Yes, hello Mark Messier, Mats Sundin, Frank Mahovlich and Denis Savard, you’re not helping us at all here. Neither are you with your fancy look-at-me high numbers, John Tavares, David Pastrnak and Evgeni Malkin. Brendan Shanahan managed to fall into both groups at the same time, wearing four different numbers in the teens and one in the nineties but refusing to help out the team by wearing No. 46 in 1996-97 like a good Mimico boy would.

We even start seeing some defensemen show up on the list, as Paul Coffey and Bobby Orr arrive on the scene. Do you remember your dad regaling you with stories about “numbah forty-six, Bobby Orr?” Yeah, neither do I. This is futile. I regret every life decision I’ve ever made that led to this.

If we drop our criteria down to 40 goals, how many more names will we add? Do I even want to know? I’m not sure I want to know.

Three hundred and three more names. That’s how many.

We are now working with 622 seasons of 40 goals or more, and as Wendel is my witness, if we don’t find our answer here I’m going to go dig a deep hole in my backyard and just lay face-down in it until the rains come.

At this point, I’m starting to see names I don’t even recognize. I think it’s at least possible that hockey-reference is messing with me. Bill Flett? Chuck Lefley? Lowell MacDonald? Are these even real people? Am I a real person? Are you?

But amid the despair, a ray of hope emerges. It comes in the form of a number: 44.

That’s a goal scorer’s number! Granted, not a great one. Not counting Guy Lafleur’s one year as a Ranger, no Hall-of-Fame forward has ever worn No. 44. But that’s OK because we’re 600 names deep in this stupid thing, and we just need 44 goals. We don’t need a Hall-of-Famer. We need a Hall-of-Good-Enough guy. And No. 44 is pretty much the No. 99 of Hall-of-Good-Enough guys.

For example, Todd Bertuzzi. Would you like to hear a story about Todd Bertuzzi? I have a story about Todd Bertuzzi. Back in 2002-03, he had a breakout year with the Vancouver Canucks. Late in the season, on March 23, 2003, he scored a powerplay goal against the Capitals to open the scoring. Not a big deal, you might think, except for one important detail: It was Todd Bertuzzi’s 44th goal of the season. And yes, he was wearing No. 44 that year.

Do you know how he celebrated? By scoring his 45th goal of the season later in that game.

Bertuzzi didn’t finish that season with 44 goals. Neither did another No. 44, Rob Brown, who had 49 in 1988-89. Stephane Richer hit 50 goals twice wearing the number, but never 44 on the nose. But there have been 39 different seasons in NHL history in which a player scored exactly 44 goals. One of them will be our guy. One of them has to be.

Or not. The hockey gods are apparently mocking me now because the list of 44-goal scorers turns out to be clogged with famous names. Patrick Kane. Paul Kariya. Bobby Hull. Jari Kurri. Jaromir. Sidney. Mario. Gordie. None of them wore No. 44. None of them ever would have.

A few guys offer up some hope. Mark Hunter? Mike Rogers? Charlie Simmer? Barry Pederson? Tony Amonte? Those guys at least sound like No. 44-type players, right? Sure they do. But they’re not.

Then comes a disturbing discovery, with the appearance of Phantom Joe Malone, who had 44 goals in just 20 games in the NHL’s very first season over a century ago. He’s our first pre-Original Six name, and here’s the thing about those days: Players had numbers, but the records of who wore what are notoriously bad. Malone is generally listed as wearing No. 7, and wearing a high number like 44 would have been unusual. But could it have happened, and nobody bothered to make a note of it in any record book? We can’t rule it out. And that means we’ve reached the point where our answer to the seemingly simple question of “Who had the most goals while matching their jersey number?” might literally be “It is impossible to know for sure.”

This would have been a good place to stop. Gentle reader, I did not stop.

No, I kept going. And I was rewarded because tucked away on our list of 44-goal scorers was a name that triggered something deep within my last remaining brain cell.

Glen Murray.

He scored 44 goals for Boston in 2002-03.

Glen Murray wore No. 44 for the Bruins.

I know this. I don’t know how, but I know it. I don’t know the color of my wife’s eyes or my own parents’ birthdays. But I damn well know that Glen Murray wore No. 44 for the Bruins. I can picture it.

Or can I? Is this all a hallucination? Did I have an aneurysm back at John Ogrodnick and the rest of this has just been the fading neural oscillations of my flat-lining final moments? Glen Murray did wear No. 44 for the Bruins, right? Please tell me he did.

With trembling hands, I turned to Google. And there it was, just like I’d pictured it. One of the most beautiful damn things I’ve ever seen.

Glen Murray did wear the number 44 for the Bruins.

Specifically, he wore it from 1991 until 1995, when he was traded to the Penguins and later the Kings before returning to Boston six years later. Nick Boynton had taken over the No. 44 in the meantime. And instead of offering it up to the returning veteran as any honorable man would, Boynton kept it for himself.

This means that while Glen Murray did indeed wear No. 44 for the Bruins, he was wearing No. 27 the season he scored 44 goals.

[Quietly staring into the middle distance.]

You know… I don’t… I don’t even know, man.

I hate Bryce, the reader who sent this question in. I hate Nick Boynton. I hate Todd Bertuzzi. I hate Phil Esposito and Dave Andreychuk. I hate the NHL. I hate you. I hate myself.

I checked all 622 of those 40-goal seasons, and I couldn’t find a match. Not one. So I kept going because I didn’t know what else to do.

Henrik Zetterberg wore No. 40 and went into the penultimate game of the 2005-06 season with 39 goals. The Red Wings scored twice late in that game to steal the win, and Zetterberg had the primary assist on both. He did not score. Then he sat out the season finale, finishing one goal shy of 40.

Vincent Lecavalier is another player who wore No. 40, and he did have a 40-goal season. But he didn’t do both at the same time. The scoring came with the Lightning, where he wore No. 4. He didn’t wear No. 40 until he went to the Flyers.

Pavol Demitra wore No. 38 for eight seasons in St. Louis, where he had seasons of 35 goals, and also 36, and also 37, but never 38. Tony Granato scored 39 goals with the Kings, for whom he wore No. 21, but not with the Rangers, for whom he wore No. 39. Chris Drury wore No. 37 with both the Avalanche and the Flames, but not with the Sabres when he scored 37 goals. Vladimir Ruzicka wore No. 38 for Boston and had 38 goals going into the season finale in 1991-92, then scored the Bruins’ final goal of the year to finish with 39.

By the time you get to the end of the list of 36-goal seasons, you’ve seen 970 names. By the time you get to 35, you’re at 1,089. I still couldn’t find a match. Was there one somewhere in there and I’d missed it? Maybe. The thought has absolutely occurred to me, more than once, often in the middle of the night. And I will tell you, with as much honesty as I can muster, that if that’s the case then I absolutely do not want you to tell me about it. I really don’t.

What I do know is that when you scroll through that many names, they all start to blend together. The same players start showing up over and over. And it was somewhere around this point that I began to wonder if the question even had an answer. Maybe we’d stumbled onto some bizarre but immutable law of the hockey universe. Maybe I’d done something terrible to Bryce in a past life and this was his way of taking revenge. Maybe I was destined to click all the way through the list of every season that has ever been in the history of the NHL, sorted from most goals to least, finding nothing at all until I made it down to the zeros and John Davidson and Martin Biron showed up on my doorstep to tell me I’d wasted my life.

I didn’t know anymore. I just wanted it to be over.

It’s Auston Matthews.

Of course it is. The best player on the current edition of my favorite team, from a recent season I watched with my own eyes. Hidden in plain sight. Well played, hockey gods.

Matthews wears No. 34. In 2017-18, he missed 20 games with injuries before returning late in March and went into the season finale sitting at 33 goals. He scored in the first period that night, and despite a handful of solid chances the rest of the way, that was it. Hockey Night in Canada had the call: “A celebration for number 34, who scores number 34.”



Of the 1,201 NHL seasons in which a player has scored 34 goals or more, Matthews is the only one to match his number.

Why? Why did the hockey gods allow that to happen, finally, on the last night of the NHL’s 100th season? Was it supposed to? Was it a glitch? Is something terrible going to happen to Matthews and the Maple Leafs now?

I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I don’t think I’m capable of knowing anything anymore. I’ve processed the names and jersey numbers of 1,201 NHL players and my broken brain does not have room for anything else.

Nobody ever send me a question ever again.