Weighted scoring race 2025-26: Who are the point merchants and unsung scorers?
Ah, the scoring race.
Despite the wealth of information available to hockey fans today, many of us start the day the same way. Coffee. Check last night’s box scores. Check the updated stats leaders. Maybe you swap the order. Or have more important things to do — like reading Daily Faceoff. But the timelessness of the NHL’s points race makes it required reading for many.
Last season, we gave the scoring race a facelift. It was badly needed. Poor fella was 108 years old and predated the forward pass. Before secondary assists were awarded. Before pulling the goalie for an extra skater was a tactic. Some simple, long overdue changes can be very revealing.
How are empty netters shaping major awards? Which players’ point totals are overrated and underrated? Who are the secondary assist and empty net merchants? Let’s find out what the 2025-26 weighted scoring race can tell us…
💡 Modernizing the Points System
While a point is a point in the box score, the modern fan knows better. The more direct a contribution is to a goal, the more impact it has on the play. Goals > primary assists > secondary assists.
You can cherry pick a particular play where this hierarchy isn’t met. But it’s true over the course of a long season. The Art Ross Trophy even credits goals ahead of assists in tiebreaker scenarios.
With all that in mind, here’s a reminder of our weighted scoring system:
| Point Type | Scored on Goalie | Empty Net (50% of value) |
| Goal (G) | 1.5 | 0.75 |
| Primary Assist (A1) | 1.0 | 0.50 |
| Secondary Assist (A2) | 0.5 | 0.25 |
While we could take this further to special teams or score-specific plays (like game winners or overtime), weighted points aren’t an attempt to reinvent the wheel. After all, we like points and they’re useful. Rather, it’s an attempt to eliminate the obvious flaws and better reward value within the points race.
🥅 Are the Ross and Rocket becoming empty net awards?
One of the biggest shifts in the NHL over the last decade? Early goalie pulls. I covered the trend in depth last season. Empty net points continue to be given primarily to superstars. Are coaches dishing ‘cookies’ to their top players? Or are they willing to ignore defensive shortcomings in the name of icing close games? It’s surely a mix of both. Ego management remains a quiet but critical part of pro coaching jobs.
There have been 22 instances of a player with 10-plus empty net points in a season — 19 of them (and counting) have been in the last five seasons alone. Yes, really. This swings points even further toward stars.
But one of the consequences of bloated empty net totals are that they now decide major award races…
Most Points Without Empty Netters
| Player | Total Points | Empty Net Points | Points vs. Goalie |
| Nikita Kucherov | 127 | 12 | 115 |
| Connor McDavid | 128 | 13 | 115 |
| Nathan MacKinnon | 123 | 11 | 112 |
The thrilling Art Ross Trophy chase among three perennial scoring titans is coming down to the wire. The likelihood of the award being decided by a secondary assist into an empty net grows by the day. Whether that bothers you likely depends on how seriously you value traditional counting stats. There are better ways to measure players than raw point totals today.
But let’s be honest: we all still care about the major awards. It’s just incredibly lame that competing in the prestigious scoring race now requires banking double-digit empty net points. The irony is that winning games too convincingly actually results in fewer empty net situations for a player.
In 2023-24, Kucherov’s 14-8 empty net point edge over MacKinnon landed the Tampa Bay Lightning‘s scoring savant a four-point Ross Trophy win. Will someone win the title that way again this season?
As for the Rocket Richard Trophy, MacKinnon’s two-goal lead has some odor to it.
Most Goals Without Empty Netters
| Player | Total Goals | Empty Net Goals | Goals vs. Goalie |
| Cole Caufield | 49 | 0 | 49 |
| Nathan MacKinnon | 51 | 5 | 46 |
Caufield’s 49-46 lead in goals on an actual goalie is erased by MacKinnon’s five empty net tucks. We’d all take empty netters if our coach put us out there. MacKinnon is a race horse on skates. He’s plus-55, a deadly, high-volume shooter, and Jared Bednar would play him 60 minutes per game if he could. But without empty netters, this is Caufield’s Rocket-winning season.
Stick tap to Dallas Stars‘ duo Wyatt Johnston (43 goals, one empty netter) and Jason Robertson (41 goals, no empty netters) who are the only others to score 40 the old fashioned way so far this season.
👑 The Weighted NHL Scoring Races
Note: all stats through Tuesday, April 7th
Top 25 Forwards
There’s nowhere to hide. A player’s assist split reveals their relative reliance on primary points versus secondary assists. The significant gaps in empty net points further shape the leaderboard.
As for The Big Three? MacKinnon’s points have more weight — he’s the league leader in goals and has both the fewest secondary assists and empty net points of the trio.
Top 15 Defensemen
By virtue of their position, defensemen get a lot of secondary assists. They simply don’t impact scoring plays as directly playing the back end. Edmonton Oilers‘ weapon Evan Bouchard remains the top-scoring defensemen after proper weighting. But the gap has tightened — Bouchard’s 38 secondary assists are tops in the NHL.
⚠️ The Merchants: Empty Stat Lines
Hockey’s ’empty’ stat line: a player with higher point totals but some combination of low goals, high secondary assists, and high empty net points.
Jack Eichel, Vegas: Eichel is one of the NHL’s most reliable bankers of soft points. Nearly 40% of them this season are secondary assists, tops among forwards with 50-plus points. Eichel’s power play stat line is wild: 20 secondary assists, five primary assists, zero goals. Goalless with just five primary points on the power play in 70 games? Feels impossible. He drops to 27th in weighted points.
Mathew Barzal, NY Islanders: Rare is the 70-point forward with under 20 goals. Sure, Barzal is famously pass-first but it creates hollow stat lines. With a pair of empty net goals, the Isles’ leading point scorer has put a puck past a goalie only 17 times this season.
Matthew Knies, Toronto: As the dust settles on Knies’ third season, his final stat line will look decent. But five goals and eight points into an empty net leave Knies with just 39 primary points against a goalie in the Leafs’ lost season.
Adam Fox, NY Rangers: It’s tough to nitpick Fox, who has managed nearly a point per game as a steady defender amidst the dysfunction on Broadway. But as a percentage of total points, he’s top five among blueliners this season in both secondary assist and empty net point rates (minimum 35 points).
Forward Merchant Leaders (minimum 50 points)
- Secondary Assist Merchants: % of Total Points
- 1. Jack Eichel, 36.6%
- 2. Vincent Trocheck, 34.6%
- 3. J.T. Miller, 34.0%
- 4. Patrick Kane, 34.0%
- T-5. Joel Eriksson Ek & Mats Zuccarello, 33.0%
- Empty Net Merchants: % of Total Points
- 1. Anthony Cirelli, 19.2%
- 2. Tom Wilson, 13.8%
- 3. Zach Hyman, 13.7%
- 4. Dylan Larkin, 13.1%
- 5. Matthew Knies, 12.5%
Defensemen Merchant Leaders (minimum 35 points)
- Secondary Assist Merchants: % of Total Points
- 1. Mikhail Sergachev, 55.4%
- 2. Adam Fox, 54.0%
- 3. Miro Heiskanen, 52.4%
- Empty Net Merchants: % of Total Points
- 1. Mattias Samuelsson, 12.2%
- 2. John Marino, 11.4%
- 3. John Carlson, 10.9%
👏 The Unsung Scorers: Full Stat Lines
Hockey’s ‘full’ stat line: a player with lower point totals but some combination of high goals, low secondary assists, and low empty net points.
Cole Caufield, Montreal: Caufield remains criminally underappreciated. The Habs’ short king has 49 goals and 86 points. Absent context, he’s a top-15 points guy. Solid. By weighted points (104), Caufield leaps 10 spots to fifth place, well ahead of teammate Nick Suzuki (94).
Dylan Guenther, Utah: The ninth overall pick in 2021 has quietly had a monster season. His 69 points sound ordinary, but he’s done it by scoring 38 goals with only nine secondary assists and a single empty net point. Guenther’s direct scoring impact launches him 16 spots in the weighted scoring race.
Matthew Schaefer, NY Islanders: Parking the hype of his age and draft status for a moment, Schaefer’s historic season has even more layers. With 22 goals, no empty net points, and a 17-19 split of primary to secondary assists, the 18-year-old’s stat line is extra high on protein and low on carbs.
Pavel Dorofeyev, Vegas: An often-forgotten man in star-heavy Vegas, no player moves up more (24 spots) in the weighted points race than Dorofeyev. Thirty-five goals. No empty net points. Nine secondary assists. It’s direct contributions or bust. The 25-year-old has more primary points on a goalie (52) than Eichel (50).
Forwards: Statistical Superlatives (minimum 50 points)
- Lowest % of Points as Secondary Assists:
- 1. Dylan Guenther, 13.0%
- 2. David Pastrnak, 14.1%
- 3. Nick Schmaltz, 14.3%
- T-4. Alex Ovechkin, 14.8%
- T-4. Pavel Dorofeyev, 14.8%
- Most Goals Without an Empty Net Goal:
- 1. Cole Caufield, 49
- 2. Jason Robertson, 41
- 3. Dylan Guenther, 38
- 4. Pavel Dorofeyev, 35
- 5. Tyler Bertuzzi, 32
Defensemen: Statistical Superlatives (minimum 35 points)
- Lowest % of Points as Secondary Assists:
- 1. Rasmus Andersson, 16.3%
- 2. Brandt Clarke, 20.5%
- 3. Justin Faulk, 27.0%
- Most Goals Without an Empty Net Goal:
- 1. Jakob Chychrun, 25
- T-2. Matthew Schaefer, 22
- T-2. Zach Werenski, 22
Closing Thoughts
Behind the curtain, many players have reputations that exceed their true scoring contributions. A lot of these ‘merchants’ are still elite. Penalizing the empty net and secondary assist compilers is simply an attempt to better assign credit where it’s due. On the flip side, goal scorers and those not gifted empty net access deserve more love than their point totals suggest.
The NHL isn’t scrapping their stats page and pivoting to a weighted scoring race. Nor should they. But secondary assists are proven to be low on repeatability, adding significant noise to scoring plays. Empty netters, meanwhile, are being spoon-fed to certain stars. So, when checking the daily scores, look beyond the primitive points definition that’s more than a century old.
The type of point being earned often tells the real story.
Data from Natural Stat Trick; NHL.com
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PRESENTED BY STAKE
