A Brief History
On October 15, 1989, Ukrainian-Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretzky passed Gordie Howe to become the all-time leading scorer in the NHL. Not only does Gretzky have more goals and assists than any other player, his 2,857 regular season points remains the NHL record.
Digging Deeper
Some of the other all-time leading scorers include:
Baseball: Rickey Henderson’s 2,295 runs scored edge Ty Cobb’s 2,245 for the MLB record.
Basketball: LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 2023 to become the NBA scoring champ with 38,652 points.
College Basketball: Pistol Pete Maravich narrowly remains the all-time scorer, with 3,667 points, only three points ahead of Antoine Davis!
Football: Adam Vinatieri showed how kickers are the premier career scorers in the NFL by posting the record 2,673 career points.
Pro Soccer: Cristiano Ronaldo is #1 with 838 goals, but Lionel Messi is not far behind with 810, and both players are still active.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Who would you add to this list?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Benedict, Jeff. LeBron. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Herman, Gail. Who Is Wayne Gretzky? Penguin Workshop, 2015.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Alain Rouiller, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
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