There is an invisible but very real wall for elite NHL hockey players. It tends to happen in between turning 37 and 38. That’s relevant since Sidney Crosby celebrated his 38th birthday last week. Crosby’s defied a lot of logic and set new standards, but this next challenge could be his biggest one yet.
At age-37, per Quant Hockey, great players still have shown a lot of point production. Crosby would know, considering his 91 points as a 37-year old was tied with Mario Lemieux as the third highest-scoring year at that age of all-time (Joe Sakic at 100 in the free-flowing 2006-07 season and Johnny Bucyk back in 197-73 being the only players to put up more).
And while it’s obviously only a change of one year to get to 38, it’s actually a very big change historically in hockey. Check it the number of seasons for each age, 37 vs 38.
100 point scorers: 1-0
90 point scorers: 4-0
80 point scorers: 7-1
70 point scorers: 13-6
65 point scorers: 17-11
60 point scorers: 25-12
50 point scorers: 51-22
The air starts leaking out of the balloon there for many of the greats. Scoring even as much as 50 or 60 points at that age is no joke — as Evgeni Malkin (50 points in 68 games last season) found out. What once was common place suddenly becomes very difficult to get to. Then scaling up towards 80+ points starts to get into uncharted territory for that age. It’s father time laid out in a brutal fashion right there. Age has to come for all of us, as they say, and for elite hockey players it tends to really rear its ugly head right around that 37-into-38 split to drastically start slowing them down.
Here are the best age-38 seasons of all-time:
For as much as modern fitness and training programs, diets, et al are talked up as extending the aging curve, there sure are a lot of old seasons in the mix here. The good news is that the old trope about playmakers aging more gracefully than others does ring true, as evidenced by Adam Oates and Ron Francis having two of the top seasons at age-38.
Joe Pavelski’s 77 points sets the bar for recent age-38 campaigns but one would think Crosby should be able to make a run towards the top of the list. He did just score 91 points last year and has the Olympics in February as a target where he will be looking to play at his max. sharpness.
With Crosby, everything at this point is history-making or record-setting, and next year will be no different. The jump from age 37 to 38 has slowed a lot of players down over the years, expect a dogged effort from Crosby to keep chugging along as much as he can — which should result in a performance for the ages.