NHL Power Play Specialists

By this measure Jaromir Jagr is 113th, Gordie Howe is 137th, Wayne Gretzky is 139th, and Mark Messier is 180th; it correctly penalizes great all-around scorers who were therefore even more effective with a little extra room a man up, and guys who accumulated powerplay goals by playing long careers. We can quibble about the order; we’re seeing the sorts of players we want. The accumulators who show up, like Dave Andreychuk, really were that type of player. The system works.

Two defensemen, coincidentally rather nearby, crack the top 50: Rob Blake (27th) and Al MacInnis (31st). It’s a bit of scrolling to the next blueliner but then there’s a cluster of Denis Potvin (55th), Shea Weber (62nd), Ray Bourque (69th), Nick Lidström (77th), and Brian Leetch (80th), then another wait before Sergei Gonchar (111th), Mathieu Schneider (116th), Phil Housley (128th), Paul Coffey (130th), and Larry Murphy (141st). Bobby Orr is not on the list because he scored only 76 PPG in his career; 28.2% of his career goals came on the power play, which is lower than I would have guessed.

This table is of course powerplay goals, not points, which means that offensive defensemen with second-rate shots get bit. However, I do wonder. There are exceptions (any offensive list that excludes Bobby Orr has a flaw) but for mortals the number of primary powerplay assists a defenseman gets by making a great pass seems small. Your classic defenseman PPA-1 is a redirected shot or a rebound for the screening forward, which is a skill play by the defenseman, or dumping the puck off to the sniper on the hashmarks and waiting for him to score, which is relatively simple. Goalscoring seems like a good proxy for generating tips and rebounds: if you take a lot of shots that goalies and defenders find hard to handle, a fair number of ’em are just going to go in. MacInnis and Blake were both monsters at this. This is all vibes and I’d be interested in any other thoughts; we’re focusing on forwards here

Most players on this list are either household names or classic ’80s Guys. However, while the top two players are also ’80s Guys, they are by far the top two, and a third player figures highly despite playing in a lower-scoring era.

1. Paul Gardner shows the interest in this approach. Gardner was an ’80s Guy (thus, lots of goalscoring) who in a 10-season NHL career never spent a full season on a team above .500 (thus, lots of powerplay time because there was nobody better to take it): he was traded to the 34-33-13 1978–79 Maple Leafs at the deadline for two scrubs, and played well enough that the Leafs chose to keep him and fell to 35-40-5. His last two seasons were with winning teams in Washington and Buffalo, but those were cameo appearances and he was mostly in the AHL. Gardner’s last NHL game was December 18, 1985 at age 29, and he went into coaching after that season. His plus/minus was usually below his team’s median and he never led his team in scoring. He was not a great player.

   But focus on what Gardner could do. On December 13, 1980, Gardner scored an power-play hat trick and added an even-strength goal: his Penguins lost 6-5 to Philadelphia and Gardner was -1². Gardner let the NHL in powerplay goals twice, in 1981–81 (21) and 1982–83 (20). On the list of year-by-year NHL powerplay goal leaders, Gardner sticks out like two sore thumbs among All-Stars and Hall-of-Famers. Even in those last two AHL seasons, Gardner was the league’s best scorer by miles: in 1984–85 he was the only 50-goal scorer in the league and won the points title by 37 points despite playing as few games as anybody in the top 10; his 130 points set the AHL record and is still the third-best ever. In 1985–86 Gardner regressed, winning the points title by only 13 points. There were three 50-goal scorers that year, but Gardner was the only 60-goal scorer; he was the AHL’s first 60-goal scorer and that is still the third-most AHL goals in a season ever³.

   Gardner had a plus mustache and, like Ryan Smyth, a reputation for gritty-but-clean play and “garbage goals” in front of the net. He struggled with his skating, injuries, and luck: he had the singular misfortune to leave the Penguins immediately before Mario Lemieux arrived. It is perfectly obvious Paul Gardner could put the puck in the net to the end of his career; we have to think the NHL missed out on something.

2. Tim Kerr is a Philadelphia Flyers legend nicknamed “The Sultan of the Slot,” and his imposing physique perhaps helped him gain the chances and reputation Gardner never quite got. Kerr led the NHL in powerplay goals three times, tied for the best ever by a non-Hall-of-Famer eligible for selection, and still holds the single-season record with 34 in 1985–86. Kerr was hardly underrated, playing in three All-Star Games and figuring in the Hart balloting a few times, but was one of many regular 50-goal scorers lost in the great goalscoring frenzy of the ’80s Guys. He had 18 NHL hat tricks in the regular season and two more in the playoffs, and even for an ’80s Guy that’s pretty good.

   Kerr, a big guy who liked to pick a spot and stay there, was never a great skater and knee injuries made him worse, while his play everywhere except in front of the other team’s goalie could be and was criticized. Unlike Gardner, Kerr played for pretty good teams as a rule, and though (as you’d expect) he was less prolific when the refs pocketed the whistles in the playoffs he still scored 40 career playoff goals, leading the playoffs in powerplay goals twice despite only making the Stanley Cup finals once (his Flyers lost to the Oilers). Gardner left at age 29 when he was still winning scoring titles in the AHL; when Kerr retired age 33 after some uninspiring NHL seasons, his knees had pretty much finished him off. Like Gardner he had a plus mustache.

3. Camille Henry is easily the best non-’80s Guy non-Hall-of-Famer on the list. Like Kerr, he led the league in powerplay goals three times, including as a rookie in 1953–54 when he somehow scored 24 goals of which 20 were on the power play and won the Calder Trophy over some kid named Jean Beliveau. In a slump the next year, he was sent down to the minors for most of three seasons, where he had a 50-goal season and won a title. Like Gardner, his teams were usually pretty lousy, probably because they did things like that, but Henry came back and, like Kerr, played in three All-Star Games.

   Henry won the Lady Byng Trophy in 1957–58 and was in the running a few other times; if the Masterton Trophy had been around he probably would have won one of them too. Nicknamed “the Eel,” Henry was slender to the point of looking emaciated, but nevertheless usually played full seasons without serious injury and perpetuated what is becoming a theme of being an effective garbage-goal merchant in front of the net. Though plus/minus only arrived midway through his career he was usually worse than his team’s median. By the time he got to Scotty Bowman, a coach who probably could have done something with him in his prime, the Eel was about washed up but Scotty got a good depth year out of the old man in 1968–69 anyway, 17 goals including 7 on the power play. After his career Henry is said to have developed a drinking problem, like his longtime teammate Doug Harvey; he coached the New York/New Jersey Knights/Golden Blades in the WHA for a couple seasons, which would have driven anyone to the bottle.

   Henry’s career shooting percentage, 20.85%, is by far the best all-time of a player who never played in the 1980s and 0.3% below Mike Bossy. He did one thing and did it magnificently.

4. Dan Quinn scored the third-highest percentage of his goals on the power play of anybody over 200, 46.24%, behind only Gardner and Tomas Holmström. Before looking it up, I would have assumed most of our powerplay specialists were Ned Braden types, but Quinn is the first who fits. He had two strokes of luck: he was an ’80s Guy and he spent his best four seasons hanging out with Mario Lemieux. He never seemed to give the impression of trying hard or really enjoying the game, he was dinged up a lot and did not hustle. In 1988–89 he can’t have seen much of Mario even strength: Lemieux finished +41, Quinn was -37, which is nowhere near the record between “team first” and “team last” but might be the record between “team first when the first was really good” and “team last when the last was really bad.” He was a minus everywhere except the man advantage and was really better off with a Super Mario around. He also took penalties. But even post-Mario, when healthy he was a useful contributor on the power play to teams that tended to need the help up through 1996.

   Since his retirement Quinn has played a good deal of high-level golf and done rather well; most retired hockey players think they’re golfers but Quinn really was. He caddied for John Daly at the 2000 US Open, when Daly pulled out early after shooting an opening-round 83, and also for Ernie Els with more success.

5. As we can see the power play specialist, so-defined, is in decline since the ’80s. Brian Bellows is an interesting edge case. He wrapped up his career when I was a kid and in my head he was a little one-dimensional sniper. By the time I saw his name on this list, though, you can imagine I was suspicious, and sure enough the record shows that though he tended to view backchecking as a nice theory and struggled with consistency, get him in the offensive zone and he played above his size, fighting for rebounds and being very difficult to clear out in front of goal.

   Bellows made the transition between ’80s Guys and hockey after the invention of goaltending. His best stats were of course his ’80s years, when scoring was easy and he was in his physical prime, but he had a useful tail-end career. In 1992–93 Bellows, Kirk Muller, and Vinny Damphousse were the power play for the Stanley Cup champions; the power play was actively bad apart from those three and Bellows was the best of the lot. Patrick Roy covers a lot of sins, of course, but in his thirties, when both he and scoring rates generally had slowed down a lot, Bellows scored 35 even strength goals and 35 with the man advantage. He was a highly competent gatecrasher-for-hire in Tampa, Anaheim, and Washington. Many of these players, like their modern equivalents, remained very useful on the power play even as their 5-on-5 skills were drying up.

6. The clearest modern specialist is Tomas Holmström. Holmström and Gardner are the only players of substance who scored most of their goals with the man advantage. He was a Detroit Red Wing during the best years to be a Detroit Red Wing. Their power play was always good, usually very good, and in his prime Holmström’s first unit time was limited because Scotty Bowman had more Hall-of-Fame forwards than could fit on the ice at once. After the big lockout, they started to get old. Actually Holmström was old too, but his game of standing in front of the goalie making his life miserable wore better than Steve Yzerman’s knees.

   Though he never led the league, Holmström especially after the lockout was a model of consistency at an age when players ought to be slowing down: 11 PPG, 13, 11 (in 59 games!), 8 (in 53 games), 13, 10, 10, retired. 13 PPG in 2009–10 led the Red Wings at age 37; 10 the next year tied for the team lead, and 10 the year after was second behind Johan Franzén, who would have been very high on this list if he scored just a little more to qualify. Franzén, by the way, was a very similar type of player, glued to the crease and impossible to dislodge, but less consistent and more injury-prone.

7. I will of course publish any list which suggests Ryan Smyth is a top-50 offensive player ever by any metric, however qualified. But there are a disproportionate number of readers who remember the Smyth-era Oilers and I ask, are we really surprised? Ryan Smyth had a soft, gooey cinnamon roll of a shot, and sure enough of the 188 forwards in my spreadsheet Smyth has the 13th-worst shooting percentage. However, all anybody heard about when Ryan Smyth was an Oiler was how he’d practice screening goalies while trying to deflect pucks with the butt-end of his stick, he was a great goalie-stand-in-front-of-er of all time, to the point where as the Oilers sagged to 11th in the West yet again I found myself hoping he might develop a less-specialized talent, but the number of greasy, greasy, Five-Guys-Burgers-and-Fries powerplay goals Smitty scored when some doofus like Marc-Andre Bergeron fired the rubber close enough that the goalie had to get a pad out and Smitty tipped or rebounded it by is… well, now we know how many.

   Just because Terry Jones wrote about Smyth’s puck-deflecting skills every time he had nothing better to say doesn’t mean he was wrong. It turns out Smyth was exactly the type of player we would now predict a powerplay specialist to be.

The powerplay specialist has a distinctive skillset: a forward, of whatever size, who gets in front of the net and stays there, with the attention and hand-eye coordination to take any dirty goals that come by. Probably the butterfly and big goalie pads are hard on that type of play and we won’t get a Camille Henry anymore.

However, the type is not extinct, Stefan Noesen scored eleven powerplay goals for the Devils last year, but even before his injury this year Sheldon Keefe seemed almost to forget about him. Blake Coleman is that kind of player, and chips in a few PPGs on those rare occasions when a coach bothers to let him; given how bad the Flames are it seems worth a try. The Oilers use Zach Hyman there; he scores at even strength too and nobody will pretend he’s the straw that stirs the drink but, like Holmström, he’s a mid-sized veteran who does good work on one of the best powerplay units ever. Besides, on a line with Connor McDavid you’re always sort of up a man.

If your team needs help on the man advantage, and you can’t afford a star, find someone who lives and dies in front of the goalie and has his hand-eye coordination, put him there, and fling shots at him. Don’t worry if he’s old, hide him on the fourth line if you have to, but use him for what he can do. He’ll give you more than some generic plug. This is elementary hockey tactics, but it works, even with players who have ceased to otherwise be productive, and for whatever reason teams sometimes overlook this option.

1. All statistics from Sports-Reference.com and accurate as of March 17, 2026; minimum 100 career PPG.
2. He is one of eight players to score four goals and record a minus in an NHL game. Mario Lemieux once did it with two even-strength goals and a short-handed goal, against the Hartford Whalers no less.
3. 2025–26 AHL Guide & Record Book (Springfield, MA: American Hockey League, 2025), 200.