Cole Caufield has quietly put together the best two-year goal-scoring stretch of any player in the NHL — and it’s not particularly close.

Add up his last two campaigns and Caufield has scored 88 goals: 37 in 2024-25, then a career-high 51 in 2025-26. No other player in the league scored more over that same two-season span. It’s the kind of number that used to belong to names like Leon Draisaitl or Alex Ovechkin, and now it belongs to a 25-year-old winger out of Wisconsin who’s spent his whole career playing in Montreal’s shadow of expectations rather than in front of them.

The Case for the NHL’s Best Pure Goal-Scorer

Widen the lens to the full two-season sample and the case gets even stronger. Caufield doesn’t just lead the league outright with 88 goals — he’s the only player in the top 10 who scored all of them at even strength or on the power play. Draisaitl, one goal back at 87, has 3 empty-netters mixed in. Nathan MacKinnon, third at 85, has 12. Strip the empty-net goals out of the equation and it’s Caufield at 88, Draisaitl at 84, and MacKinnon down at 73 — not particularly close at all.

The 51-goal season wasn’t a hot streak that cooled off, either — if anything, Caufield got hotter as the year went on. Since January 1 of the 2025-26 season, nobody in the NHL scored more than he did: 32 goals in 41 games, ahead of guys like Nikita Kucherov, Leon Draisaitl and Wyatt Johnston over that same stretch — and Draisaitl was doing it before a lower-body injury shut him down for the rest of the regular season in mid-March.

He finished the season one goal behind Nathan MacKinnon (52) for the Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy as the league’s top goal-scorer — but a few numbers suggest Caufield’s 51 might have been the more complete goal-scoring season of the two:

• 29 go-ahead goals — second-most in a single season in NHL history, behind only Brett Hull
• 12 game-winning goals — led the entire NHL
• 20.6% shooting on 248 shots on goal
• Just 14 penalty minutes, the fewest of any player with 30+ goals, on his way to his first Lady Byng Trophy

That combination — elite volume, elite timing, and almost no penalty minutes — is why he was named to the NHL’s Second All-Star Team alongside MacKinnon, David Pastrnak, Evan Bouchard, Rasmus Dahlin and Logan Thompson.

Company Montreal Hasn’t Kept in Decades

The 51 goals made Caufield just the seventh player in Canadiens history to hit the 50-goal mark, and the first since Stéphane Richer scored 51 in 1989-90 — 36 years ago. He got there on April 10, 2026, beating Tampa Bay at the Bell Centre, and admitted afterward the milestone was on his mind more than he let on: asked if 50 goals occupied his thoughts, he first said “no,” then caught himself — “of course! I’m still hungry. We have a few games left to play.”

Before that, he’d already become the first Hab to reach 40 goals since Vincent Damphousse in 1993-94. And his go-ahead-goal total broke a franchise record that had stood since Guy Lafleur.

Lafleur is really the last real comparison point here. The Flower led the NHL in scoring twice in the 1970s, including a 60-goal season in 1977-78 — the last time a Canadiens player finished as the league’s outright goal-scoring leader. Caufield came within one goal of matching that this year. It’s not unreasonable to say Montreal hasn’t had a goal-scorer this good, this consistently, since Lafleur was doing it half a century ago — a point The Hockey News and Yardbarker have both made in their own breakdowns of his season.

Why It Matters Going Into 2026-27

Two-year goal totals are a better measure of a scorer than any one season, and by that measure the conversation about the NHL’s best pure goal-scorer has to include Caufield’s name right now — not “someday,” not “if he keeps developing.” He’s already there.

The part that should have Montreal excited heading into training camp is that none of this looks like a ceiling. He’s 25. He’s playing alongside a captain in Nick Suzuki who just posted his first 100-point season, with Ivan Demidov and Lane Hutson still climbing. If Caufield takes even a half-step forward again, the Rocket Richard Trophy he just missed by one goal stops being a “what if” and starts being the realistic expectation — and a Canadiens player hasn’t won that trophy since it was created in 1999.