In the calendar juncture just before the NHL playoff races reach their boiling point, we get milestone season. This late in a year, players’ statistical&nbsp;accomplishments come into focus. Sidney Crosby will likely tie Wayne Gretzky with a 19th consecutive&nbsp;point-per-game season. Auston Matthews should soon become the first player this millennium with multiple 60-goal campaigns.



And now that Alex Ovechkin has caught fire in the second half, his chase for Gretzky’s NHL record of 894 career goals feels very realistic again.



With 894 looking likely to fall, here’s a question for the Roundtable:&nbsp;What is hockey’s most unbreakable record?&nbsp;For fun, let’s make a rule that we can’t pick the same one.



MATT LARKIN:&nbsp;For me, it’s&nbsp;Glenn Hall’s 502 consecutive games in net.&nbsp;It almost feels like I shouldn’t be allowed to pick this one. Goalies in 2023-24 rarely if ever start on&nbsp;TWO CONSECUTIVE DAYS. Let that sink in. Hall, pre-game vomiting and all, played the equivalent of six-plus 82-game seasons without missing a start. And he did it without a mask. The accomplishment feels like it happened in another sport. I apologize for my pick, because it’s over. I win. I rigged the game.<div class="injected-ad injected-video" data-nn-ad-tech-injection-count="0" data-nn-ad-tech-max-gap="130" data-nn-ad-tech-current-gap="190"></div>



FRANK SERAVALLI: Congratulations to Matt for picking the lowest hanging fruit possible. By the way, I wasn’t sure that anyone would challenge Gretzky’s record of scoring in every home game, but that Nathan MacKinnon has a chance to do that this year is bananas. Typically I’d try to find one of Gretzky’s still-standing 58 records, but I’m going to go with&nbsp;Teemu Selanne scoring 76 goals as a rookie. No matter which generational talent comes to the forefront, I don’t know that we’ll ever see that again.&nbsp;



PAUL PIDUTTI: I’ll give a nod to the goaltender’s union and say&nbsp;Patrick Roy’s 151 career playoff wins. It’s 38 more than contemporary Martin Brodeur (113) in second place. A goalie would need to&nbsp;average&nbsp;10 playoff wins per year for 15 straight years. Think about that. For perspective, three-time Cup finalist&nbsp;Andrei Vasilevskiy is only at 65 career wins. And at 49 wins, Jonathan Quick is more than 100 (!) playoff victories behind Roy. With goaltenders debuting later in life and traditional dynasties extinct in the salary cap era, the Islanders head coach won’t ever be caught.<div class="injected-ad" data-nn-ad-tech-injection-count="1" data-nn-ad-tech-max-gap="130" data-nn-ad-tech-current-gap="180"></div>



MIKE GOULD: Too easy. Unless the NHL expands to 40 teams and the talent pool is diluted by a ridiculous amount, nobody is ever scoring 50 goals in 39 games ever again. Gretzky did that all the way back in 1981-82, when goaltending was, uhhhh, not *quite* at the level it is today. Nobody has scored 50 goals in his team’s first 50 games since Brett Hull did it with the 1991-92 Blues, so I think it’s pretty safe to say Gretzky’s 50-in-39 record is untouchable.



STEVEN ELLIS:&nbsp;Cheeky? Most ties by a goaltender. A real one? I’m going to go with&nbsp;most penalty minutes by a goalie in a single season&nbsp;instead. Ron Hextall had 113 PIM in 1988-89 while holding the top three spots in single-season league history. No other goaltender has come close to 100, and there’s been six instances of a goaltender getting 30 or more in a season since 2000. Funny enough, four of those came during the 2003-04 season with Pasi Nurminen, Marty Turco, Robert Esche and Tomas Vokoun all doing it. Jordan Binnington came close with 29 in 2022-23, but even he has seemed to have mellowed out a bit.<div class="injected-ad" data-nn-ad-tech-injection-count="2" data-nn-ad-tech-max-gap="130" data-nn-ad-tech-current-gap="194"></div>



SCOTT MAXWELL:&nbsp;I could be lazy and go with another goalie record, particularly something like Martin Brodeur’s career games played and wins records, especially when you consider the fact that after Marc-Andre Fleury, 35-year-old Sergei Bobrovsky needs more than 500 games and 300 wins to reach Brodeur’s totals, and amongst today’s elite goalies, 29-year-old Andrei Vasilevskiy is 800 and 400 away.



Instead, I’ll go with Henri Richard’s record of&nbsp;most Stanley Cup wins as a player&nbsp;at 11. While it is still achievable in the sense that the evolution of the game’s play or tactics hasn’t necessarily gotten in the way of a player pulling it off, Richard got the record when it was a lot easier to win the Stanley Cup. Seven of Richard’s 11 Stanley Cup wins came when there were only six teams, so it was much easier to make the playoffs and win the Stanley Cup, while the final four were in the early years of expansion that saw the league add 12 mediocre at-best teams over eight years before Richard retired, with only his final season seeing more than one of those teams infiltrate the top six with the Original Six teams, and that wasn’t a Cup-winning season. Now, there’s 32 teams, only half of them make the playoffs, and with the salary cap, it’s a lot harder to pull off a dynasty quite like the Montreal Canadiens have over the league’s history. In fact, only six active players have three Cup wins, the youngest of those being Patrick Kane, and only Chris Kunitz has managed to win four Cups in the 21st&nbsp;century. Basically, the only way you’d be able to pull this off in the modern era is by either timing your stays with dynasties perfectly, or hopping from team to team on one-year deals and hoping that each season is with a team that wins the Cup. It just doesn’t seem possible today.<div class="injected-ad" data-nn-ad-tech-injection-count="3" data-nn-ad-tech-max-gap="130" data-nn-ad-tech-current-gap="317"></div>



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