NHL Players Must Have Been on Steroids During the 2023-24 Season

Over the weekend, a few of my friends and I went over to Legends Pub here in Richmond to catch up and talk about what’s going on in our lives. But obviously, with us, the conversation always comes back to sports, especially hockey, which is all of our favourite sport.

As the highlights started rolling on the TV, we found ourselves talking about how disgustingly good players like Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Quinn Hughes, Nikita Kucherov, Sidney Crosby, and others really are.

It’s honestly ridiculous how good they are at hockey.

Then it had me reminiscing about some of their career highs, and somehow the conversation circled back to that crazy NHL season from a couple of years ago. The NHL’s 2023–24 season.

And after going back and looking at some of the numbers from that year, I’ve come to a conclusion.

While the talent in the NHL has never been better than it has been over the past three to five years, players must have been on something that season, because some of those statistics, if you go look on NHL.com, are absolutely ridiculous.

I genuinely don’t think we’ll see another season like that.

That season, we had nine players score over 100 points. And they included the following:

Nikita Kucherov – 144

Nathan MacKinnon – 140

Connor McDavid – 132

Artemi Panarin – 120

David Pastrňák – 110

Auston Matthews – 107

Leon Draisaitl – 106

Mikko Rantanen – 104

J.T. Miller – 103

Just typing those numbers out still feels insane.

That doesn’t even take into account that we had seven defencemen score over 70 points that year. I won’t type them all out, but Quinn Hughes was the defenceman who won the Norris that year, nearly scoring 100 points with 92 on the season. And you had a guy like Cale Makar who couldn’t even win the Norris because he “only” scored 90 points.

We may never see that again.

And going back to the forwards, Auston Matthews nearly scored 70 goals that year with 69, the most since Mario Lemieux in 1996. And Matthews couldn’t even get a Hart nomination because of how good Connor McDavid, Nikita Kucherov, and Nathan MacKinnon were that year.

Before that season, no player had 100 assists in a season since The Great One, Wayne Gretzky, in 1991. Then McDavid and Kucherov both stole each other’s thunder because they both did it in the same year. And that still wasn’t good enough to win the Hart Trophy as league MVP for either of them, because Nathan MacKinnon won it, and rightfully so, as he scored 51 goals that year.

Oh, and those 51 goals were only good enough for fourth in the NHL.

Matthews finished first with 69. Sam Reinhart finished second with 57. Zach Hyman rounded out the top three, finishing just ahead of MacKinnon with 54.

Absolutely outrageous numbers across the board that whole season for all of these superstar players.

I don’t think we’ll ever see a season like that again statistically, even with how good the talent has been.

And that’s not even mentioning how good the postseason was that year.

In the first round, we had a sneakily good series between the Vegas Golden Knights, who were the defending Cup champions at the time, and the Dallas Stars, who beat Vegas in seven games. We had a classic Bruins–Maple Leafs series, where the Bruins obviously beat Toronto once again in seven games.

Then in the second round, we got a Western Canadian battle between the Canucks and Oilers that went the distance where Edmonton prevailed.

Fast forward all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, and we almost had an all-time comeback. The Panthers went up three games to none on the Oilers. Then Edmonton stormed back to win three straight to force a Game 7, coming up just one goal short of completing what would’ve been, in my opinion, the greatest comeback in the history of sports.

And oh yeah, even though the Oilers didn’t win, the Conn Smythe Trophy for playoff MVP still went to Connor McDavid, who put up 42 points in that postseason run. He became just the third player ever to record 40 points in a single playoff run. Only behind Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux.

That’s not a bad club to be in, Connor, even if you lost the Cup Final that year.

So, as we enter the stretch run of this NHL season, I keep looking back at that year thinking the players had to have been on something, because there’s no other explanation for how great that season was.

I pray we get another season like that again.

My working theory is maybe the international play over the last two seasons kind of got players out of their groove. But next year, without international play or any type of pause in the season, I wouldn’t be shocked if we get a similar type of statistical explosion from some of these players as they get back into their rhythm and don’t have a two-week break in the middle of the year.