Wayne Gretzky
Dominik Hasek
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Wayne Gretzky leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Wayne Gretzky at #1 and Dominik Hasek at #10.
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The case for Wayne Gretzky
No athlete has dominated a major sport the way The Great One dominated hockey. Gretzky holds more than 60 NHL records, many likely permanent: 2,857 career points, 894 goals and an untouchable 1,963 assists, a total that alone would still lead the all-time scoring list without a single goal. He scored 92 goals in 1981-82 and a staggering 215 points in 1985-86, and posted a 51-game point streak that no one has approached. He won four Stanley Cups with the Edmonton Oilers, nine Hart Trophies as MVP (eight of them consecutive), and ten Art Ross Trophies as scoring champion. His 1988 trade to Los Angeles is often credited with transforming hockey into a genuinely national sport in the United States. Not the fastest skater or the hardest shooter, Gretzky saw the ice a beat ahead of everyone, operating from behind the net, his office, to orchestrate the most prolific offence the sport has known. He is the definitive GOAT, and the gap to second place is the widest in hockey.
The case for Dominik Hasek
No goaltender ever stopped the puck quite like The Dominator. Unorthodox to the point of chaos, flopping, sprawling, smothering pucks with his back, his mask, anything, Dominik Hasek was mesmerizingly effective, and his .922 career save percentage remains elite decades on. He won a record six Vezina Trophies as the league's best goaltender and, astonishingly for a netminder, two Hart Trophies as overall MVP in 1997 and 1998, the only goalie to win it twice in the modern era. In 1998 he backstopped the Czech Republic to a stunning Olympic gold in Nagano, shutting out Canada in a shootout and blanking Russia in the final, a performance that made him a national hero. He won two Stanley Cups with Detroit late in his career, in 2002 and 2008. Hasek's flexibility and competitiveness let him steal games single-handedly, and at his mid-1990s peak with the Buffalo Sabres he was arguably the most valuable player in the sport regardless of position. He reinvented what elite goaltending could look like.