By: Owen Kewell

There’s something beautiful about scoring a goal.

Goals are the building blocks that make up hockey success, both on the individual and team level. They are a single moment in time, a culmination of a series of plays that ends with one team’s attack successfully defeating the other’s defense.

Teams are forever searching to add goals to their lineup, and for good reason. Goals win games, playoff series and, eventually, championships.

Goal-scoring is a repeatable talent, and while certain NHLers are far better at it than others, each player does it their own way. Each scorer exhibits unique tendencies of shot type selection and shot location.

Alex Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Connor McDavid, Nikita Kucherov, and Patrik Laine are five of the best scorers in the game. Of the 10 goal leaders for the 2017-18 season, these five players possess the highest career goals per game rates. They are the elite of the elite when it comes to putting the puck into NHL nets.

I wanted to explore how they each do it differently.