Talk:List of NHL players with 500 goals

When should this be updated?
Should we update the active players' statistics after each game they play, after each goal they score, or just after each season? The reason I ask is that Peter Bondra played his first game with the Blackhawks tonight and scored his 499th career goal. --Idont Havaname (Talk) 05:24, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
 * If a player scores 500 goals, then update their stats. Otherwise, wait until the end of the season. Because the list can become very cluttered if you have random updates for select players. Perhaps we could do a table-wide update during the all-star break? -- Scorpion0422 05:28, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Team by Team 500-Goal Scorers
The section Team by Team 500-Goal Scorers is very misleading. It includes those players who scored their 500th goal with that team, not actually those who scored all 500 goal with that team. Only a few players have scored 500 goals with the same team. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 16:09, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

List of 500-Goal Scorers
You can't tell who is first, fifth, 10th etc without counting down the list.....what good is that? Juve2000 (talk) 23:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)


 * It says right next to their name the order in which they achieved their 500th goal. If you mean the order of most all-time goals, then simply press the graphic that looks like [><] next to the Goals column. It will turn into a [^] (for ascending order) then click again and it will look like [v] (for descending order). Or you can go to List of NHL statistical leaders: Regular season goals. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 00:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree that this is a bad way to do this. I think it should be organized by the number of goals. I will put in a temporary edit and move it to permanent unless there is objections Imaslee  pviking  ( talk ) 23:42, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Also, as an additional rational, all other sports statistics are listed in descending order of amount rather than date. Imaslee  pviking  ( talk ) 23:51, 5 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Except for several other pages of lists which are sorted by date. e.g List of NHL players with 1000 points and List of NHL players with 50-goal seasons, 50 home run club.  The following are also by date although they are mostly ties: List of players with five or more goals in an NHL game and List of players with eight or more points in an NHL game. 174.119.19.211 (talk) 03:11, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
 * You can't really compare seasonal things (50 goal seasons, 50 home run club) to career things. I counter your point with 3,000 strikeout club and 300 win club. Also, anything with "or more" in it is inherently given to having been sorted by amount instead of date. Imaslee  pviking  ( talk ) 15:26, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't dispute that most lists are by quantity, just the "all" claim. Why can't you compare seasonal things to career things?  Both occurred over time where more is better.  Arbitrarily discounting them shows how arbitrary this change is.  You should be arguing that they should be changed as well.  Meanwhile the "or more" game lists are the worst ones to sort by quantity.  The vast majority of 5 goals (52 of 60) or 8 points (14 of 15) lists were at the lower limit.  Sorting these by quantity would be meaningless. 174.119.19.211 (talk) 01:20, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I think the career games column should be along side the career goals column. 174.119.19.211 (talk) 03:11, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
 * The original listing tells you who was the first player to score 500 NHL goals and the latest one who score 500 NHL goals. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.237.73.225 (talk) 23:08, 10 July 2011 (UTC)

Since this page is a list of players who have reached the 500 goals plateau, it should be in chronological order. For those who want the list ranked by number of goals, there is a page for that, it is called «List of NHL statistical leaders» : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NHL_statistical_leaders IMartien ( talk )

I believe there is a place for another section in this page : the evolution of the number of games needed to achieve the 500 goals milestone. It would simply go like this:
 * 863 games — 19 October 1957 — Maurice Richard
 * 861 games — 21 February 1970 — Bobby Hull
 * 803 games — 22 December 1974 — Phil Esposito
 * 647 games — 2 January 1986 — Mike Bossy
 * 575 games — 22 November 1986 — Wayne Gretzky
 * IMartien ( talk ) —Preceding undated comment added 10:15, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

Why is this not up to date?
Earlier, someone vandalized the page. While it WAS vandalism, they did raise a very good point: Why is everyone insisting on the list being out of date (i.e. without Iginla) until the end of the season? On the 1000 points page last season, there were four players who reached the milestone (Alfredsson, Kovalev, Iginla, Thornton) and they were added, but without career totals so they could be updated at the end of the season. This makes sense. Leaving Iginla off the list until April, however, does not make sense. And just tacking something onto the "within 50" bit saying he reached it doesn't help - it just makes the fact that he SHOULD be on the list even more blatant. We sort of need a way to solve this problem. 70.79.198.253 (talk) 22:43, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
 * That list is sorted by date so its order wouldn't change and the career points and games were left blank for the new players. Meanwhile this list is sorted by career goals, the order of which may change on a daily basis. 99.245.230.74 (talk) 04:12, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Editnotice
Because of all the editing and reverting of mid-season updates, there is method to at least warn editors when updates are appropriate. Editnotice seems to do the trick, though only an admin can add them. The text underneath the table at Editnotice spells out the steps to create them. Anyone think that this may help with the edits? &mdash; MrDolomite &bull; Talk 16:34, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Time to update the scoring of the active 500 goal scorers
I think it's time to update the scoring of the active 500 goal scorers since the 2012-13 NHL Season is over. BattleshipMan (talk) 23:34, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Trottier/Mikita
When listing what countries these players are from, there should be a consistent standard for which one "wins" when there are two or more plausible answers. If it's by birth, you get to count Trottier as Canadian, but would have to count Mikita as Czech (or possibly Slovak, I don't know his family background in detail). If it's who they played for internationally, Mikita would count as a Canadian, but I think most would agree you'd have to consider Trottier an American. In either case, it's at least not obvious both should count as Canadians. (I guess you could go by citizenship too, though that's not a possibility the article mentions. This would generally work out the same as going by who they played for internationally.)

Personally I prefer the latter definition - it corresponds better to how hockey fans actually think of these players, and what they themselves identified as at the time they were doing the things that make hockey fans interested in them. The way that bit of the article is currently written seems to rely on an agenda-pushing double standard where if there's any sort-of-plausible way to count someone as Canadian, you do so. 50.72.9.214 (talk) 12:49, 20 August 2020 (UTC)


 * This is complicated, because Trottier was born and raised in Canada, and Mikita was Canadian raised/trained. Trottier also played more internationally for Canada, and after a skirmish with Peter Stastny (who was playing for Canada as a Czechoslovakian defector), he remarked on the Canadian crowd that "they booed me, a born and raised Canadian, and cheered some Czech." I would consider Trottier and Mikita both primarily Canadian, but I agree that there should be a consistent standard. The standard that the NHL uses on their website is the standard of the Hockey Hall of Fame, which is place of birth, which would make Trottier (and Brett Hull) Canadian, and Mikita Slovakian. I think this is the most fair standard. Also worth noting that Jari Kurri is not the first 500 goal scorer to never play for the Canadian national team. Jean Beliveau was Canadian but played before NHL players played international events. 99.237.222.68 (talk) 16:21, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

When players joined League relative to their 500th goal game
Wouldn't it be prudent, especially with regard to the section about the players who took the fewest games to reach 500, to show when they entered the League as well? You can't really appreciate that fully from the number of games played and the date shown. I think a more explicit statistic (e.g. first NHL game played) would go a long way toward showing that. Otherwise it just sort of lacks good context. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist  (Speak quickly) (Follow my trail) 03:26, 14 October 2021 (UTC)