The fastest skater in the NHL, measured by the tracking system the league installed in every arena, is Beck Malenstyn. The Buffalo Sabres forward was clocked at 24.94 mph, or 40.14 km/h, in the third period of a home game against Washington on 12 March 2026. He is not a star, he is not a scorer, and his name is not the one most readers expect.
Two entirely different numbers are called the fastest skater record, and they don’t describe the same thing. One is a top speed recorded during an actual game. The other is a lap time from the All-Star skills competition. They use different units, different conditions, and different holders.
| Season | Player | Position | Team | Top speed | Metric | When it happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | Denis Gurianov | R | Dallas Stars | 24.60 mph | 39.59 km/h | 16 October 2021, at Boston |
| 2022-23 | Ryan Poehling | C | Pittsburgh Penguins | 24.32 mph | 39.14 km/h | 15 October 2022, vs Tampa Bay |
| 2023-24 | Owen Tippett | R | Philadelphia Flyers | 24.21 mph | 38.97 km/h | 10 January 2024, vs Montreal |
| 2024-25 | Miles Wood | L | Colorado Avalanche | 24.82 mph | 39.94 km/h | 10 April 2025, vs Vancouver |
| 2025-26 | Beck Malenstyn | L | Buffalo Sabres | 24.94 mph | 40.14 km/h | 12 March 2026, vs Washington |
Five completed seasons of tracking, five different leaders, and the whole table fits inside a range of 0.73 mph. Denis Gurianov set the first tracked mark at 24.60 mph for Dallas in the third period of a loss at Boston. Ryan Poehling’s 24.32 mph came in the second period of a 6-2 Pittsburgh win over Tampa Bay. Owen Tippett’s 24.21 mph for Philadelphia, the lowest winning figure of the five, was recorded in overtime against Montreal. Miles Wood then raised the tracked record to 24.82 mph for Colorado in April 2025, and Malenstyn took it off him eleven months later.
Who is the fastest skater in NHL history?
Tracked in-game speeds only exist from the 2021-22 season onward. Malenstyn’s 24.94 mph is therefore the fastest skating speed ever measured in an NHL game, and that is a precise claim about a five-season window rather than the league’s history. Any list that reaches back to Bobby Orr, Pavel Bure, Paul Coffey or Mike Gartner is built on All-Star lap times, scouting impressions and recollection, because nobody was measuring skating speed in games at all.
So no one can verify the fastest skater in NHL history, and there cannot be. What exists is a tracked record from 2021-22 onward, a separate competition record, and a long pre-tracking era with no comparable measurement.
How fast is the fastest skater in the NHL in mph?
Malenstyn’s record stands at 24.94 mph, which converts to 40.14 km/h. For scale, the league-wide average for a player’s single fastest burst in a season was 22.17 mph in 2025-26, so the record sits 2.77 mph above it, about 12 percent faster than the typical NHL skater’s best moment of the year.
The striking thing about the units is how narrow the whole range is. All five tracked season records fall between 24.21 mph and 24.94 mph. The fastest skater in the league in a given season is not far ahead of the fourth- or fifth-fastest, and the figure that separates a record year from an ordinary one is a few hundredths of a mile per hour.
Who is the second fastest skater in the NHL?
The league publishes the leader for each season, and for 2025-26 it also published the names behind the top mark. Malenstyn’s 24.94 mph led; Nathan MacKinnon of Colorado was second at 24.78 mph, and Connor McDavid was third at 24.61 mph, a figure he reached in the second period against Calgary in October. The gap from first to third is 0.33 mph, which is a smaller spread than the one between the fastest and slowest of the five season records in the table above.
Worth noting across both of this page’s tables: no player has ever led both a regular season and a playoff run for top speed in the tracked era.
The NHL Fastest Skater competition record is a different number
The record most often quoted in answer to this question is not a speed at all. It is a lap time, and it belongs to Dylan Larkin of Detroit, who skated the Fastest Skater course in 13.172 seconds at the 2016 All-Star Skills competition as a rookie, taking the mark off Mike Gartner’s 13.386 seconds from 1996.
The part almost everyone gets wrong is what happened the following year. Connor McDavid won the 2017 event with a lap of 13.02 seconds, beating Nikita Kucherov’s 13.16. A faster time than Larkin’s, which is why the claim that McDavid holds the record circulates so widely. But the 13.02 was the competition run, not a record attempt. McDavid was then given a separate attempt at the record under stricter conditions, starting from a line drawn a few feet from the red line instead of further back, and that run came in at 13.31 seconds, leaving him 0.138 behind Larkin. The league’s own account of the night describes Larkin’s time as one he achieved “with the help of a running start from the blue line”.
So the honest statement is narrower than either version usually told. McDavid skated the faster competition lap. Larkin holds the record. And the two runs were not the same test, which is the reason both facts are true at the same time. Larkin’s preliminary time that year, 12.894 seconds, was quicker still but came on a shortened course and has never counted. The full report of the 2017 event lays out both of McDavid’s runs.
One practical note for anyone expecting the lap record to fall: the NHL did not stage an All-Star weekend in 2021, 2025 or 2026. The next one is scheduled for 5 and 6 February 2027. Larkin’s time has stood unchallenged for long stretches simply because the event was not held.
READ MORE: Dylan Larkin stats by team in 2026, and the opponent he has never solved
NHL top speed bursts, and what McDavid leads instead
Top speed measures one instant, and McDavid’s advantage is not an instant. His best tracked figure has placed him above the 98th percentile in all five seasons, and in 2025-26 it was in the 99.67th, meaning fewer than four skaters in a thousand went faster. He has still never led the category.
What he does lead, and lead by a distance that has no parallel anywhere in the tracked data, is how often he reaches high speed. The system counts every burst above 20 mph, and in 2025-26 McDavid recorded 681, compared with a league average of 75.2. That is nine times the average player’s count.
That number describes him: not the single fastest stride in the league, but a player who spends his shifts at a speed most skaters touch only a handful of times a season. He also covered 330.27 miles of tracked distance in that season against a league average of 123.55, which is 2.7 times the field.
READ MORE: Why Is Connor McDavid So Fast? The Mechanics Behind Hockey’s Quickest Skater
The fastest skaters in the Stanley Cup playoffs
Flip the same data to the postseason and the list of holders changes character completely.
| Playoffs | Player | Team | Top speed | Metric | When it happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Nathan MacKinnon | Colorado Avalanche | 24.54 mph | 39.49 km/h | 17 May 2022, vs St. Louis |
| 2023 | Ryan Lomberg | Florida Panthers | 24.05 mph | 38.70 km/h | 18 May 2023, at Carolina |
| 2024 | Connor McDavid | Edmonton Oilers | 23.85 mph | 38.39 km/h | 27 May 2024, vs Dallas |
| 2025 | Connor McDavid | Edmonton Oilers | 23.92 mph | 38.49 km/h | 23 April 2025, at Los Angeles |
| 2026 | Cale Makar | Colorado Avalanche | 23.92 mph | 38.50 km/h | 21 April 2026, vs Los Angeles |
Nathan MacKinnon, Connor McDavid twice, and Cale Makar. Four of the five playoff marks belong to players anybody could name, which is the opposite of the regular-season table further up this page. McDavid led the postseason in back-to-back springs, in 2024 and 2025, having never led a regular season.
Where the league-wide average is going
The average NHL skater’s top speed has edged upward across the tracked era, from 22.03 mph in 2021-22 to 22.17 mph in 2025-26, with a small dip in the final season from a 2024-25 peak of 22.18 mph. The movement is 0.14 mph in five seasons, which is close to nothing.
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