Three Dark Horse NHL Candidates To Win The Rocket Richard Trophy

Scoring goals consistently is one of the hardest things to do in the NHL, which is what makes players like Alex Ovechkin and Auston Matthews such amazing, valuable players.

But even those truly elite players have a hard time winning the Rocket Richard — given annually to the NHL's top goalscorer — year after year. They've handed out this award 27 times, and only six players have won it more than once, partly because Ovechkin has won it nine times.

But is there anyone out there who could enter the ranks of first-time winners out of nowhere? Here are some dark-horse picks who could get the job done:

Kucherov has won two Hart Trophies and led the league in scoring three times between 2019 and 2025. Although he's never won the Rocket, he's a sneakier goal-scoring threat than he often gets credit for.

He's finished top-10 in the league in goals six times since 2017, finishing one year as high as second. Last year, he tied a career high with 44.

Why might he take that next step up to 50 in 2026-27? It's very simple: he's in a contract year. He's not signed beyond this season, motivated to land one last monster deal of his career (he turned 33 in June), and on a Lightning team looking to prove that its days of truly contending for the Stanley Cup haven't ended. Sounds like a great recipe for a guy we've seen get spurred on by spite.

He will need to shoot the puck more than the 231 he put on goal last year, but it's easy to see the league's current MVP taking the reins with both hands on more shifts.

Gauthier's goal total jumped from 20 to 41 in his second full season, and because he is still just 22 until mid-January, it's easy to see that upward trajectory continuing.

The Ducks, as a whole, still seem to be building momentum toward legitimately competing for a Stanley Cup. Gauthier will have to be part of that step forward, and if he is, it feels as though 50 goals — and maybe the Rocket Richard — should be within striking distance.

In particular, a little improvement in the Ducks' power play, which ran at just 18.6 percent last season versus the league average of 21.1 percent, could be the thing that gets Gauthier the extra handful of goals he needs to really get into this conversation.

Gauthier also scored just three goals into empty nets, while Rocket winners are often at or near the top of the league in that stat; Nathan MacKinnon, who won it last year, had eight. But Gauthier also wasn't often out there in that situation, registering just 9:37 of time on ice, less than one-third the 30:46 MacKinnon enjoyed, according to NaturalStatTrick.com. Coach Joel Quenneville could easily help his star winger in this regard.

Like Gauthier, Boldy enjoyed his first 40-plus-goal season last year despite missing six games, but he's also routinely shown he can be in the 25-30 range over the first handful of years in the league.

The good news is that he mostly does it as his own offensive engine; he doesn't play much 5-on-5 with a premium distributor like Kirill Kaprizov (just 48:31 last year), and his most common linemates were Marcus Johansson and Joel Eriksson Ek.

But that wasn't Boldy's key connection. He scored just five power-play goals and 17 total in his first 32 games last year before Quinn Hughes entered the fold. He racked up 25 total goals and six on the power play in his final 44 games. If he scores at that pace all season, he would finish with around 47 goals, and it's not hard to add a couple more here and there with a little more familiarity between Boldy and Hughes.

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