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Aging Skaters Keep Their Top Speed and Reach It Less Often
NHL tracking has followed every skater for five full seasons. Top speed barely fades with age. How often a player reaches 20 mph falls by about half between 25 and 37, and the slowest veterans are gone before the data can count them.
By Edgehalla ResearchPublished 10 min read
On April 6, 2025, in Elmont, N.Y., Alex Ovechkin took a cross-ice pass from Tom Wilson and beat Ilya Sorokin on a power play for his 895th goal, one more than Wayne Gretzky. He was 39.
That season the league’s tracking caught him above 20 miles an hour 16 times in 65 games. The next season Connor McDavid did it 681 times.
Yet Ovechkin’s fastest moment of that season was within two tenths of a mile an hour of his top speed at 36. What age had taken from him was how often he got there.
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A 37-year-old finds his top gear half as often
The NHL has only recently started timing its skaters. Since 2021-22, NHL EDGE, the league’s tracking system, has followed every skater and the puck through every game. Two of its numbers come closest to a sprint test. One is top speed, a player’s single fastest moment of the season. The other is what NHL.com calls “20-plus mile per hour speed bursts”: how many times he passed 20 mph. We call each of those a burst.
To see what age does to them, we followed the same players from one season to the next. Each skater was compared with himself a year earlier, whenever he played 40 or more games in both seasons. That gave us 950 skaters and 2,003 back-to-back pairs of seasons. Their top speed hardly moved. Their bursts fell year after year.
Top speed barely moves with age; bursts past 20 mph fall by half
Change from age 25, same players followed season to season
Age
Show data
| Age | Top speed | Bursts over 20 mph a game |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | 0% | −18% |
| 21 | 0% | −9% |
| 22 | 0% | −3% |
| 23 | 0% | −1% |
| 24 | 0% | 1% |
| 25 | 0% | 0% |
| 26 | 0% | −3% |
| 27 | 0% | −6% |
| 28 | −1% | −10% |
| 29 | −1% | −14% |
| 30 | −1% | −17% |
| 31 | −1% | −22% |
| 32 | −2% | −26% |
| 33 | −2% | −29% |
| 34 | −2% | −35% |
| 35 | −2% | −40% |
| 36 | −2% | −43% |
| 37 | −3% | −48% |
| 38 | −3% | −51% |
- Reference: Age 25 (0%)
The flatter line is top speed. From 25 to 37 the same players lost 0.57 mph of it, about 2.5% of what they had. Most of that was gone by 35 (0.49 mph). Allow for our margin of error (0.50 mph either way), and the true loss at 37 lies somewhere between 0.07 and 1.07 mph. That whole range is above zero, so some loss is probably real. We can’t say how big it is any closer than that.
The falling line is bursts. A 25-year-old with 40 or more games passed 20 mph about 1.4 times a game. By 30 the same players did it about a sixth less often (17%). By 33 they were down 29%, by 35 40% and by 37 48%, about half. Allow for the margin of error, and the true drop at 37 lies somewhere between 32% and 65%. Even the low end is about a third fewer bursts. That is far too big to be luck.
Bursts don’t fall off a cliff at 30. They start sliding at about 26, and every year after that takes roughly another 2 to 6 percent off the age-25 level.
We can follow only the players who stayed in the league. The slowest veterans, players like Zdeno Chara, are already gone by the season they would have been measured. So the real decline is probably steeper than the curve shows.
Nathan MacKinnon got faster and slower at once
Those are 950 players averaged together. Nathan MacKinnon’s career shows the same thing in one man. Ovechkin against McDavid is an unfair fight. McDavid is 11 years younger, and his 681 bursts in 2025-26 were the second-most of any season in our data. No average 29-year-old comes near that. The fairer test is one man in his prime, measured against himself.
In 2023-24, Nathan MacKinnon passed 20 mph 713 times in 82 games for Colorado, the most in our five seasons of data. Two seasons later, at 30, his fastest moment of the season was 24.78 mph, the best of his five tracked seasons. He just went there less: 455 times in 80 games, about 5.7 a game instead of 8.7. His minutes barely moved (22.3 a game, against 22.8).
MacKinnon is one man. The league curve shows the same thing. Players play fewer minutes from their early 30s on, and fewer minutes mean fewer bursts. So we also counted bursts for every minute a player was on the ice. By 35, the same players were on the ice 13% less each game than at 25. In each minute they were out there, they reached 20 mph 29% less often. The two losses stack. Lose 13% of your minutes, then reach 20 mph 29% less often in the minutes you have left, and you end up with about 40% fewer bursts a game. They don’t simply add up, because the second cut comes out of a smaller pile of minutes. At 35 the per-minute part is the bigger of the two.
Ovechkin fits. From 36 to 40 his ice time fell from 20.6 to 17.4 minutes a game. His bursts for each minute on the ice fell by about two thirds. Over every 60 minutes of ice time, he went from 1.44 bursts to 0.50.
Bursts start falling years before ice time does
Change from age 25, same players followed season to season (40+ games). Per 60 minutes = per full game of ice time.
Age
Show data
| Age | Bursts a game | Bursts per 60 minutes | Ice time a game |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | −18% | −1% | −16% |
| 21 | −9% | 2% | −11% |
| 22 | −3% | 4% | −6% |
| 23 | −1% | 2% | −3% |
| 24 | 1% | 1% | 0% |
| 25 | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| 26 | −3% | −3% | 0% |
| 27 | −6% | −8% | 2% |
| 28 | −10% | −11% | 2% |
| 29 | −14% | −15% | 2% |
| 30 | −17% | −16% | 1% |
| 31 | −22% | −19% | 0% |
| 32 | −26% | −22% | −2% |
| 33 | −29% | −23% | −5% |
| 34 | −35% | −27% | −8% |
| 35 | −40% | −29% | −13% |
| 36 | −43% | −29% | −17% |
| 37 | −48% | −31% | −25% |
| 38 | −51% | −30% | −34% |
- Reference: Age 25 (0%)
Watch the ice-time line. It rises a little through the late 20s, peaks at about 27 and falls clearly only from about 32. The bursts start going years earlier. By 37 the minutes have nearly caught up: ice time is down 25% and bursts per minute 31%. By then the two parts are close to even. Fewer minutes cost a player almost as many bursts as the per-minute slowdown does.
Averaging every 37-year-old gives almost the same answer
Does an old player really keep his top speed, or do only the fast old players stick around? That question is why MacKinnon was measured against himself, and why every player on the curve is too. The simple way to chart speed by age is to average everyone at each age. But the 37-year-olds still in the league are the ones who stayed fast enough to keep a job. Jordan Staal was 37 in 2025-26 and hit 23.11 mph. A plain average of 37-year-olds counts him and never sees the men who were gone by 37.
Here the two ways land close together. The 33 skaters aged 37 with 40 or more games averaged a top speed of 21.99 mph, against 22.45 at 25. Following the same players lands at 21.88. For bursts the two agree: about half gone by 37 either way.
Old players’ top speed looks the same whether you track each man or average everyone
Players with 40+ games, regular season 2021-22 to 2025-26
mph
Age
Show data
| Age | Everyone at each age | Same players over time |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | 22.4 mph | 22.4 mph |
| 21 | 22.4 mph | 22.4 mph |
| 22 | 22.4 mph | 22.5 mph |
| 23 | 22.4 mph | 22.5 mph |
| 24 | 22.4 mph | 22.5 mph |
| 25 | 22.4 mph | 22.4 mph |
| 26 | 22.4 mph | 22.4 mph |
| 27 | 22.4 mph | 22.3 mph |
| 28 | 22.3 mph | 22.3 mph |
| 29 | 22.3 mph | 22.3 mph |
| 30 | 22.3 mph | 22.3 mph |
| 31 | 22.2 mph | 22.2 mph |
| 32 | 22.0 mph | 22.1 mph |
| 33 | 22.0 mph | 22.1 mph |
| 34 | 22.0 mph | 22.0 mph |
| 35 | 21.9 mph | 22.0 mph |
| 36 | 21.9 mph | 21.9 mph |
| 37 | 22.0 mph | 21.9 mph |
| 38 | 21.9 mph | 21.8 mph |
From 20 to 38 the two lines are never more than two tenths of a mile an hour apart. So top speed holds up with age by either count. There is one catch. The lines match this well only after a step we explain further down: taking out the whole league’s own speed-up. Skip that step and the same-player line would end at 22.22 mph at 37, a little above the plain average. So this chart can’t tell us which of the two methods is closer to the truth.
A player who slowed down and then left the league drops out of both lines. Neither one ever sees the season he would have played next. Zdeno Chara is the clearest case.
Zdeno Chara passed 20 mph once at 44
In 2021-22, Chara played 72 games for the New York Islanders at 44; no skater in the tracking data was older. He was on the ice for 18.7 minutes a night. The tracking caught him above 20 mph once all season. The average 25-year-old with 40 or more games did it about 1.4 times a game, or about 100 times over 72 games.
On Sept. 20, 2022, Chara signed a one-day contract with the Boston Bruins and retired, at 45, with the NHL record for games played by a defenceman. He did not put it down to age alone. “Biological age of your body, you can’t deny it,” he said. “But that was not the main reason. … My decision was based on my family.”
Others in the same corner of the data also did not play another NHL season. Patrick Maroon passed 20 mph once in 68 games for Chicago in 2024-25, at 36. Alexander Edler did it once in 64 games for Los Angeles in 2022-23. David Savard did it three times in 75 games for Montreal in 2024-25. None of them has a next season, so the curve never learns how much more they would have slowed.
The players who left were already slower
Chara was not alone. We took every season in which a player played 40 or more games from 2021-22 to 2024-25, and checked whether he skated in the next NHL regular season. Ovechkin had four such seasons, so he counts four times. Among players 34 and older, 48 seasons were followed by a year with no NHL games. In those seasons the player averaged 0.51 bursts over 20 mph a game and a top speed of 21.66 mph. In the 176 seasons where the player came back, the averages were 0.72 bursts and 21.98 mph.
At every age, the players who left had been reaching 20 mph less often
A player’s seasons with 40+ games, 2021-22 to 2024-25
Players 34 and older who did not play the next season averaged 0.51 bursts a game; those who returned averaged 0.72.
- Played the next season
- Did not
In every age group the bar for the players who left is shorter. The gap is smallest at 28 to 30. From 31 on, the players who left burst 33% and 29% less often than the ones who stayed. The table below sets each group against the league’s average that season, where 0 is average and a minus sign means below it.
| Age | Played the next season | Top speed vs average (mph) | Bursts a game vs average | Seasons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 or younger | No | -0.14 | -0.10 | 45 |
| 27 or younger | Yes | +0.14 | +0.20 | 1202 |
| 28-30 | No | 0.00 | -0.11 | 31 |
| 28-30 | Yes | +0.01 | -0.02 | 545 |
| 31-33 | No | -0.57 | -0.57 | 27 |
| 31-33 | Yes | -0.18 | -0.28 | 362 |
| 34 and older | No | -0.61 | -0.64 | 48 |
| 34 and older | Yes | -0.30 | -0.43 | 176 |
Read the “No” rows against the “Yes” rows. At 28 to 30 the two are level on top speed. In every other age group the players who left were slower. At 31 to 33, the ones who stayed were about two tenths of a mile an hour below that season’s average. The ones who left were about six tenths below it, roughly three times as far. At 34 and older it was about six tenths against three tenths. Each row compares different men of the same age within one season.
The groups of leavers are small: 27 seasons at 31 to 33 and 48 at 34 and older. The oldest leavers were also about a year older than the oldest stayers (36.4 against 35.3 on average), and that extra year explains a little of the difference. Some left because of injuries, which may have slowed them in their last season too.
Some fast players leave too. Jason Spezza passed 20 mph about 1.9 times a game at 38 for Toronto, Andrew Cogliano 1.8 at 36 for Colorado and Jeff Carter 1.4 at 39 for Pittsburgh. All three beat the average 25-year-old, and none of them played the next NHL season.
Defencemen run out of bursts sooner
The slide is not the same for everyone. Brent Burns played all 82 games in each of the five tracked seasons. At 40, for Colorado in 2025-26, he was still on the ice for 18.9 minutes a night, with a top speed of 22.15 mph and 0.37 bursts over 20 mph a game. Defencemen burst far less often to begin with. At 25 the average defenceman passed 20 mph 0.67 times a game, and the average forward 1.75 times. Defencemen also keep their minutes longer.
Counted for each minute on the ice, though, defencemen lose their bursts faster. By 35 a defenceman reaches 20 mph 58% less often per minute played than he did at 25. A forward of 35 does it 26% less often. Defencemen’s top speed also falls a little more, about 0.6 mph by 35. Forwards lose about 0.5 mph.
Defencemen may lose their bursts faster than forwards
Change from age 25, same players followed season to season (40+ games). Per 60 = per full game of ice time.
Top speed−2%
Bursts over 20 mph per 60−26%
Show data
| Top speed: Forwards | Top speed: Defencemen | Bursts over 20 mph per 60: Forwards | Bursts over 20 mph per 60: Defencemen | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21 | 0% | 0% | 2% | 6% |
| 22 | 0% | 1% | 5% | −3% |
| 23 | 0% | 0% | 2% | 3% |
| 24 | 0% | 0% | 1% | 1% |
| 25 | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| 26 | 0% | −1% | −3% | −10% |
| 27 | 0% | −2% | −7% | −14% |
| 28 | −1% | −1% | −10% | −15% |
| 29 | −1% | −1% | −14% | −22% |
| 30 | −1% | −1% | −15% | −28% |
| 31 | −1% | −2% | −17% | −34% |
| 32 | −1% | −3% | −19% | −44% |
| 33 | −2% | −2% | −19% | −49% |
| 34 | −1% | −3% | −23% | −56% |
| 35 | −2% | −3% | −26% | −58% |
| 36 | −2% | – | −25% | – |
| 37 | −2% | – | −26% | – |
In the bursts panel the defence line falls below the forwards’ line from 26 on, and the gap widens through the early 30s. That gap might not hold up. Only 22 defencemen made the step from 34 to 35 in our data. A defenceman passes 20 mph less than once a game, so a burst or two either way makes his numbers jump. At 35 defencemen are down 58% per minute and forwards 26%. Allow for the margin of error, and the true defence figure could be anywhere from about 29% to 87%. The low end is close to the forwards. So the gap could be luck.
Sidney Crosby skated faster at 38 than at 34
Then there are the veterans who just kept going. Of the skaters 33 or older with 40+ games in 2021-22, 17 still played 40+ games in 2025-26. They are the rare veterans who lasted four more seasons, and eight of them had a higher top speed four seasons later. Sidney Crosby went from 22.38 to 22.86 mph at 38, and he still passed 20 mph about twice a game, more than the average 25-year-old. Brad Marchand, 37, went from about 1.2 bursts a game to 2.0 in 52 games for Florida. Jordan Staal, 37, had the fastest top speed of the group in 2025-26, 23.11 mph.
Eight of 17 veterans who lasted four more seasons hit a higher top speed
Season top speed, players with 40+ games in both seasons
Show data
| 2021-22 | 2025-26 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alex Ovechkin (36) | 22.16 mph | 21.64 mph | −0.52 mph |
| Brent Burns (36) | 21.83 mph | 22.15 mph | +0.32 mph |
| Corey Perry (36) | 22.00 mph | 20.81 mph | −1.19 mph |
| Evgeni Malkin (35) | 21.45 mph | 21.51 mph | +0.06 mph |
| Ryan Reaves (35) | 22.54 mph | 21.55 mph | −0.99 mph |
| Anze Kopitar (34) | 21.70 mph | 21.33 mph | −0.37 mph |
| Claude Giroux (34) | 21.91 mph | 21.84 mph | −0.07 mph |
| Jeff Petry (34) | 22.59 mph | 22.42 mph | −0.17 mph |
| Kris Letang (34) | 22.53 mph | 22.13 mph | −0.40 mph |
| Mats Zuccarello (34) | 21.97 mph | 21.11 mph | −0.86 mph |
| Nick Foligno (34) | 21.01 mph | 21.30 mph | +0.29 mph |
| Sidney Crosby (34) | 22.38 mph | 22.86 mph | +0.48 mph |
| Brad Marchand (33) | 22.10 mph | 22.41 mph | +0.31 mph |
| David Perron (33) | 21.02 mph | 22.18 mph | +1.16 mph |
| Jonathan Toews (33) | 22.95 mph | 21.64 mph | −1.31 mph |
| Jordan Staal (33) | 22.28 mph | 23.11 mph | +0.83 mph |
| Patrick Kane (33) | 21.77 mph | 22.80 mph | +1.03 mph |
Jonathan Toews is the hardest case. At 33 he hit 22.95 mph and about 1.2 bursts a game for Chicago. The next season, his last there, he managed about 0.4. He then missed two seasons; CP24 reported he had “not played in the NHL since 2023 due to health concerns related to long COVID and chronic immune response syndrome.” He came back with Winnipeg in 2025-26 at 37, at 21.64 mph and about 0.5 bursts a game. “As the year went along I got stronger every month,” he told reporters when he signed. From 33 to 37 his bursts fell by more than half, a much steeper drop than the league curve shows for those ages. How much of either drop was illness, and how much was age, the data cannot say.
Corey Perry shows how far a player can go with almost no bursts left. At 40 he passed 20 mph three times in 72 games, split between Los Angeles and Tampa Bay. The average 25-year-old does that in about two games. Perry still scored 17 goals and 37 points, and he kept his job. “With the Kings, Perry posted 11 goals and 28 points (11-17=28) in 50 games,” the Kings noted when they signed him again in July 2026, at 41. (The figures in brackets are goals, assists and points: 11 goals and 17 assists.)
The whole league got a little faster, so we took that out
Every curve so far measures a player against the league in that same season. That matters, because the league itself sped up. Skaters with 40 or more games averaged a top speed of 22.24 mph in 2021-22 and 22.36 in 2025-26, and most of that rise came in 2024-25. The same players sped up most in that season too. Maybe the game changed, maybe the tracking did; that is the subject of a separate story. Here we treat the rise as something that happened to everyone, and take it out.
The rise is only about 0.03 mph a season. But the curve from 25 to 37 stacks 12 one-year steps, so a small yearly rise adds up. If we skip the adjustment, the top-speed loss from 25 to 37 is 0.23 mph instead of 0.57, still inside our margin of error. Bursts fall 41% instead of 48%. Five seasons can’t fully pull a faster league apart from aging. If part of the rise came from fast young players replacing slow old ones, rather than everyone speeding up, the true top-speed loss sits somewhere between 0.23 and 0.57 mph. Even the bigger one is about half a mile an hour over 12 years.
Is the halving of bursts real, or an accident of how we cut the data? We cut it other ways. Split the players into two groups at random, and both show the slide: bursts a game down 45% and 36% by 35. Count players with 20 or more games, or 60 or more, instead of 40, and bursts at 35 are down 39% or 36%. One check gives a shakier answer. The early seasons and the late ones disagree on the size of the drop: 25% at 35 from the first two season-to-season steps, 54% from the last two. Both show a clear fall. Each of those has just two pairs of seasons to work out how much the whole league changed, so its answer swings a lot.
Burst counts are the number to watch
- Top speed hides a decline. It moves only about 0.05 mph a year, a twentieth of a mile an hour. One fast skate is enough to set a season’s best, so a player who has slowed down can still post a top speed that looks normal.
- Burst counts show it. As the curve showed, players already burst about a sixth less often a game by 30. Through 35, most of that loss is fewer bursts in each minute they play. It starts at about 26, years before their minutes go.
- Team speed is a different question. Our Prop Lab test of skating speed found faster lineups control a little more of the play, and the betting odds don’t fully reflect that. It looks promising, but it isn’t yet a reliable way to win bets.
Ovechkin played all 82 games at 40
After the record goal, his longtime teammate John Carlson said, “To do what he’s doing at this age is incredible.”
In 2021-22, at 36, Ovechkin passed 20 mph 38 times in 77 games, with a top speed of 22.16 mph. In 2025-26 he was 40, and he played all 82 games. His top speed was 21.64 mph, about half a mile an hour lower. The tracking caught him above 20 miles an hour 12 times, about once every seven games. He scored 32 goals.
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- Tests written down
- Not in advance (exploratory)
- Results computed
NHL EDGE season totals for every skater, regular season 2021-22 to 2025-26 (3,048 player-seasons with 40+ games), with ages from NHL birth dates on February 1. How the curve is built: each season’s top speed, bursts and ice time are first measured against that season’s league average (skaters with the same games threshold). For each pair of back-to-back seasons by the same player with 40 or more games in both (2,003 pairs from 950 skaters), we take the change; the average change at each age is one step, and the steps are added up from age 25 in each direction (the delta method). Percentages are of the age-25 level. Margins of error are two standard errors, treating each step as independent: ±0.50 mph on top speed at 37, ±16 points on bursts a game at 37, and ±29 points on the defence burst curve per 60 at 35 (22 pairs on the 34-to-35 step). One-year burst steps from 26 to 38 range from 2.1 to 6.0 percentage points of the age-25 level.
Continues below
Exact figures behind the rounded prose: top speed −0.49 mph by 35 and −0.57 by 37 (−0.20 and −0.23 without the league adjustment); bursts per 60 down 29% at 35 and 31% at 37; ice time down 13% and 25%; forwards’ top speed −0.45 mph by 35 and defencemen’s −0.61; leavers 31 to 33 0.57 mph below the season average against 0.18 for stayers (27 and 362 seasons), at 34 and older 0.61 against 0.30 (48 and 176); league average top speed rose 0.11 mph over four seasons (0.03 a season). The plain average at each age (cross-section) uses every player-season with 40+ games at that age, 33 at 37. Exits: a season counts as “did not return” when the player has no NHL regular-season game the next season (retired, unsigned, injured all year or left for another league); 2025-26 is excluded because its next season is not finished. Robustness: two random halves of players (even and odd NHL ids), 20+ and 60+ game thresholds, and the first two vs the last two season-to-season steps (2021-22 to 2023-24 against 2023-24 to 2025-26). Named players’ lines (players.csv) are EDGE season totals joined to goals and points from the NHL stats API; they are scenes, not tests. Ovechkin’s top speed gap in the opening (0.17 mph, 2021-22 to 2024-25) and at 40 (0.52 mph, 2021-22 to 2025-26) is raw, not league-adjusted. EDGE season totals cannot say how fast anyone was on a given goal or in a given game.
Continues below
Bursts over 20 mph include bursts over 22 mph. EDGE season data has no acceleration or time-to-top-speed measure, so this is not a hockey 40 time (a timed straight-line sprint).
| Test | Result | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Top speed barely falls with age | 0.57 mph (2.5%) from 25 to 37, same players; 0.23 mph without the league-drift adjustment | Holds either way |
| Bursts over 20 mph halve by the late 30s | 48% fewer a game at 37 than 25; 40% at 35 | Holds |
| The burst drop is just less ice time | Per 60 minutes, down 29% at 35; ice time down 13% | Does not hold |
| Same-player curves show a bigger decline than the cross-section | Top speed 21.88 vs 21.99 mph at 37 (22.22 without the league-drift adjustment); bursts about the same | Only with the league-drift adjustment; leavers are missing from both |
More tests below
| Test | Result | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Random half of players reproduces the curve | Bursts at 35: 45% vs 36%; top speed 0.47 vs 0.55 mph | Holds |
| Games threshold does not drive it | Bursts at 35: 39% (20+ games), 40% (40+), 36% (60+) | Holds |
| First and last season steps agree | Bursts at 35: 25% (2021-22 to 2023-24 steps) vs 54% (2023-24 to 2025-26) | Direction holds, size does not |
| Defencemen lose bursts faster than forwards | Per 60 at 35: 58% vs 26% | Suggestive, small sample |
| MacKinnon’s 2023-24 is the most bursts over 20 mph in a season | 713, rank 1 of 3,048 player-seasons with 40+ games; McDavid’s 681 in 2025-26 is next | Holds in our data; not an official record |
Frequently asked questions
At what age do NHL players start to slow down?
In NHL EDGE tracking from 2021-22 to 2025-26, the same players reached 20+ mph a little less often each season from about 26. By 30 they did it 17% less often per game than at 25, and by 35 40% less. Their top speed barely changed.
Does NHL top speed drop with age?
Only a little. Following the same players, top speed falls about 0.5 mph from 25 to 35 and 0.57 mph by 37, about 2.5%, after we take out the rise in league top speeds over these seasons. Without that adjustment the drop is about 0.2 mph by 35 and 0.23 by 37.
Is the decline just less ice time?
Partly. At 35 the same players skate 13% fewer minutes a game, but their bursts over 20 mph per 60 minutes are also down 29%.
Do slower veterans retire sooner?
It looks that way. Players 34 and older who did not play the next season averaged 0.51 bursts over 20 mph a game, against 0.72 for those who returned (48 and 176 seasons of 40 or more games).
Who had the most 20 mph speed bursts in an NHL season?
In EDGE regular-season data from 2021-22 to 2025-26, Nathan MacKinnon’s 713 in 2023-24 (82 games) are the most, followed by Connor McDavid’s 681 in 2025-26. That is the most in our five seasons of data; we found no NHL source that calls it a record.
How fast is Alex Ovechkin now?
In 2025-26, at 40, his top speed was 21.64 mph, against 22.16 at 36 in 2021-22. He passed 20 mph 12 times in 82 games, down from 38 in 77.
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Sources and method
- NHL EDGE (NHL.com), player and puck tracking since 2021-22
- NHL EDGE skating speed detail endpoint (top speed and bursts over 20 mph per season)
- NHL stats API: skater season totals (goals and points)
- Associated Press, Stephen Whyno, via News4JAX: Ovechkin breaks Gretzky’s career goals record (April 6, 2025)
- NHL.com, Amalie Benjamin: Zdeno Chara retires from hockey (Sept. 20, 2022)
- NHL.com, Troy Perlowitz: NHL EDGE stat trends and storylines (Dec. 28, 2024)
- CP24, Charles Lefebvre: Jonathan Toews to sign with hometown Winnipeg Jets (June 20, 2025)
- The Canadian Press, via TSN: Toews grateful, excited to play after signing with Winnipeg (July 4, 2025)
- NHL.com (LA Kings): Kings sign forward Corey Perry to one-year contract (July 1, 2026)
Research and analysis, not betting advice. Past results do not guarantee future returns; bet only what you can afford to lose.