DENVER\u00a0–\u00a0The 2025-26 National Hockey League regular season concluded with Avalanche forward\u00a0Nathan MacKinnon\u00a0winning the Maurice \u201cRocket\u201d Richard Trophy as the League\u2019s goal-scoring leader.<\/p>\n
MacKinnon\u00a0finished with 53 goals (53g\/74a) in 80 games\u00a0to earn the award for the first time in his career. He finished\u00a0two\u00a0goals ahead of Montreal\u2019s Cole Caufield\u00a0and\u00a0joins Milan Hejduk (50g\/48a in 2002-03) as the only players in Avalanche\/Nordiques franchise to take home the award. The 6-foot, 200-pound\u00a0center held sole possession of the NHL-lead since Dec. 2 and never went more than five games without lightning the lamp. He scored in 39 of his 80 showings and registered a multi-goal game 14 times.<\/p>\n
Since the award’s inception in 1998-99, there have been only six instances of\u00a0the winner being in his 30s (age at end of season). Four of the previous occurrences were from Alex Ovechkin \u2013 coming in 2015-16, 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 (tied) \u2013 and one from Pavel Bure in 2000-01.\u00a0<\/p>\n
MacKinnon\u2019s 53 goals are a career-high, topping his previous best of 51 from 2023-24 when he was the Hart Trophy winner. MacKinnon was the first NHLer to score 50 goals this season, which came occurred on April 1, and the only other instance of an Avalanche\/Nordiques player being the \u201cFirst to 50\u201d was Hejduk in 2002-03. The Avalanche\u2019s alternate captain was also the first to 10 (tied), 20 (tied), 30 and 40-goal marks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The centerman\u2019s longest goal streak this\u00a0season was four games, done on two separate occasions. MacKinnon also finished tops among 2025-26 NHL performers in multi-goal games (14), even-strength goals (42) and goals per game (0.66).\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 53 times MacKinnon lit the lamp are tied for the sixth-most in Avalanche\/Nordiques history and are the third-most since the franchise relocated to Denver ahead of 1995-96.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DENVER\u00a0–\u00a0The 2025-26 National Hockey League regular season concluded with Avalanche forward\u00a0Nathan MacKinnon\u00a0winning the Maurice \u201cRocket\u201d Richard Trophy as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":554329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5116],"tags":[193,192,144,5277,5,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-554328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-colorado-avalanche","8":"tag-avalanche","9":"tag-colorado","10":"tag-colorado-avalanche","11":"tag-coloradoavalanche","12":"tag-hockey","13":"tag-nhl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116418694191142799","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}