Which defenseman has the most points through his first 500 NHL games?

The NHL's public stats API (api.nhle.com) serves a line for every player in every game the league lists, from 1917-18 on; the ledger reads it for every season, and the running season is refetched daily. Birth dates are Wikidata's (CC0), joined through the NHL's own player ids. The NHL's own milestone records (Gretzky's 50th goal in Edmonton's 39th game, Lemieux's in his 44th and Pittsburgh's 46th, McDavid's 1,000th point in his 659th game) are the gates the build has to pass before it ships.

What is not here: WHA games (the NHL does not count them, so Howe's, Hull's and Gretzky's WHA years are out), All-Star games, and the 1918 to 1926 Stanley Cup Finals against the PCHA and WCHL champions, which the league lists as playoff games against a team that was never in the NHL. The 2020 qualifying round counts as playoff games, as the league counts it. Team codes are the codes of the day (the Hartford Whalers are HFD, not CAR).

Each stat starts when the league started recording it, and the sentence says so: goals, assists, points and penalty minutes from 1917-18; power-play and shorthanded goals from 1933-34; a goalie's saves from 1955-56; shots and plus-minus from 1959-60 (official from 1967-68); a goalie's overtime losses as their own decision from 2005-06. A career that began before a stat's first season sits out that stat's career fields, and the board says how many did. Assists were credited more sparingly before the mid-1930s, so a points board across that line compares two scoring rules. Before 1997-98 the league recorded no ice time.

A game is one the player dressed for and the league lists him in, 0-point games included; before 1997-98 the league recorded no ice time, so dressing is the only test there is. A start exists for goalies only, from the league's own flag. A win is a goalie's decision; for a team game it is the team's result, and a loss in overtime or a shootout is its own result, not a loss, the way the standings count it. "Team games of a season" count the team's schedule from opening night, so a player who sat one has a gap the window still counts; that is the window the record book uses for "50 goals in 50 games", which is why Lemieux's 1988-89 reads 46 here and 44 by his own games. The regular season is the default; the word beside it switches the playoffs in, and the two are never summed without saying so. "Seasons" are NHL seasons, so a first season is not always a rookie season: Gretzky's 137 points in 1979-80 came after a WHA year, and the league's rookie records skip him.

Ranks are competition ranks, ties included. "Still inside the window" lists the players who haven't played the whole window yet, with their total so far. An age on a fastest-to board is the player's age on the day of the game that got him there, from his birth date, where it is known. The panel reads a row against a peer: where their curves met, and what the player needs over the next five games to match the peer there; the peer rides in the url, so a shared link opens the same comparison. A player's page lists every comparison he leads among the skaters (a goalie's, among the goalies), worded at the point in the career where it stands out most, or that he set and someone later broke; "what he leads" in the panel goes there. A team page counts a player's regular-season games for one franchise: a current team and every team it has been, as the NHL last ruled. On September 24, 2026 it gave the Winnipeg Jets the first Jets' seasons (1979-96) and the Atlanta Thrashers'; the inactive Coyotes and the defunct teams have no page.

A career window favors the game as it was scored in the 1980s: a regular-season game had nearly eight goals in it, where today's have about six, and the 1940s credited fewer assists per goal than any decade since. So "most points through the first 500 games" reads Gretzky, Lemieux, Stastny, Bossy and Kurri before McDavid, the first name on it who debuted after 1990, and the modern names on these boards are the ones who were great from game one. The birth year is in the panel.

The era word in the sentence is how to ask the fair question. Its cuts are the league's own: 1942-43, the Original Six, when the Brooklyn Americans folded and six teams played 25 seasons alone; 1967-68, expansion, when six teams became twelve; 1979-80, the WHA merger, which brought Edmonton, Quebec, Winnipeg and Hartford and Gretzky with them; 1992-93, the 84-game seasons and the next wave of expansion; 2005-06, the salary cap and the shootout, after the lost season; 2015-16, 3-on-3 overtime. A stat's own wall (shots and plus-minus from 1959-60, saves from 1955-56) is the first choice when it is later than the ledger's start.

The ledger is the league's book, and the league re-audited its early seasons in 2017, so a 1920s line here can differ from an old encyclopedia's. Against the Hockey Databank (through 2017-18, joined through Wikidata), 98 of 100 skater seasons match exactly on games, goals and assists, 99 or better from the 1970s on, 61 in the 1910s and 74 in the 1920s, where the re-audit moved assists and a few games; goalie seasons match 97 in 100, with a dip in the 1960s on wins and games played that nobody has explained yet. The 1917-18 schedule lists two games the Montreal Wanderers defaulted; they have no lines and are dropped before the schedule is numbered, so Montreal's and Toronto's game numbers match the season table. A goalie's shots against from before 1955-56 are a placeholder, not a number, and read as missing.