The hardest shot in the NHL, measured by the league’s own puck and player tracking system, belongs to Tage Thompson. The Buffalo Sabres forward was clocked at 106.00 mph, or 170.59 km/h, in the third period of a game at Dallas on 31 December 2024. Across five completed seasons of tracked data, nothing else has come within 2 mph of it.
That is a short history, and the shortness is the point. The NHL has only published tracked shot speeds from games since the 2021-22 season. What follows is the complete list, season by season, of every player who owned the hardest tracked shot in a regular season.
| Season | Player | Position | Team | Hardest shot | Metric | When it happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | Colton Parayko | D | St. Louis Blues | 101.95 mph | 164.07 km/h | 22 March 2022, at Washington |
| 2022-23 | Radko Gudas | D | Florida Panthers | 101.71 mph | 163.69 km/h | 16 January 2023, at Buffalo |
| 2023-24 | Colin Miller | D | New Jersey Devils | 102.59 mph | 165.10 km/h | 20 January 2024, vs Dallas |
| 2024-25 | Tage Thompson | C | Buffalo Sabres | 106.00 mph | 170.59 km/h | 31 December 2024, at Dallas |
| 2025-26 | Tyler Kleven | D | Ottawa Senators | 103.51 mph | 166.58 km/h | 31 January 2026, vs New Jersey |
Five seasons, five different names. Colton Parayko opened the tracked era with 101.95 mph for St. Louis in a 5-2 win at Washington. Radko Gudas took the 2022-23 mark with 101.71 mph for Florida, the softest winning figure of the five.
Colin Miller’s 102.59 mph in January 2024 came while he was a New Jersey Devil, in a game Dallas won 6-2 at the Prudential Center. Then Thompson’s 106.00 mph, and Tyler Kleven’s 103.51 mph for Ottawa in a 4-1 win over New Jersey, came at 12:37 into the third period.
What is the hardest shot in NHL history?
The hardest shot ever measured in an actual NHL game is Thompson’s 106.00 mph. The hardest shot ever measured anywhere in the NHL is Zdeno Chara’s 108.8 mph, set at the 2012 All-Star Skills competition in Ottawa, and that record still stands. Both figures are true. They are answers to different questions.
Then there is the third number that circulates: Bobby Hull’s slap shot at more than 118 mph. The league’s own account of it uses the word reportedly, notes that the measuring technology of the era was not as good, and gives no date, venue, or equipment. Hull also played long before the Hardest Shot competition existed, so the figure cannot be a competition record of any kind.
NHL hardest shot record in a game versus the competition record
The gap between Chara’s 108.8 mph and the hardest tracked in-game shot is not a mystery once you read the rules of the event.
The league’s published rules put a single stationary puck on the ice 30 feet from the center of the goal. The shooter may start no further back than the nearest blue line and skate at it with a full run-up. The net is empty. Each player gets two attempts, and only the better one is scored. Nothing in that description resembles a shot taken in a game.
Is the hardest shot in the NHL always a slapshot?
Four of the five tracked season leaders are defensemen: Parayko, Gudas, Miller and Kleven. That’s no coincidence: the hardest shot in hockey is usually taken from the point, with a wind-up and the whole body behind it, and the players at the point are often defensemen.
The honest limit here is that the tracked data records a speed and a moment, not a shot type. It does not label a shot as a slap shot, a wrist shot, or a one-timer.
Thompson is the exception in the table in more ways than one. He is a forward; he stands 6-foot-6, and he shoots from range in a way few forwards do. His 106.00 mph shot was 22.08 mph above the league-wide average for a player’s hardest shot that season.
What Thompson’s 106 mph shot beat
When the shot was recorded, the league noted that it was the hardest in an NHL game across four seasons of tracking. It surpassed Thompson’s previous NHL-leading mark of 104.69 mph, set against Detroit on 26 October 2024, and the league-best 103.77 mph Michael Kesselring posted two days earlier. Thompson broke the record twice in ten weeks, and the second time by more than a mile per hour. The league’s write-up of Thompson’s 106.00 mph remains the primary account of the night.
NHL hardest shot winners and how the competition record climbed
The All-Star event is the other half of the answer, and its record has moved only a handful of times since the competition began.
| Year | Winner | Figure | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Al Iafrate | 96.0 mph | The first Hardest Shot competition |
| 1993 | Al Iafrate | 105.2 mph | A record that stood for 16 years |
| 2009 | Zdeno Chara | 105.4 mph | Beat Iafrate by 0.2 mph |
| 2012 | Zdeno Chara | 108.8 mph | The record, and his fifth straight title |
| 2015 | Shea Weber | 108.5 mph | The second-fastest in the event’s history |
Chara’s run of titles reads 100.4 mph in 2007, 103.1 in 2008, 105.4 in 2009, 105.9 in 2011 and 108.8 in 2012, with no All-Star weekend in 2010. Shea Weber won it four times and came within 0.3 mph of the record in 2015. Victor Hedman and Elias Pettersson each won with 103.2 mph, Cale Makar with 102.5 mph, Alex Ovechkin with 101.3 mph, and John Carlson with 102.8 mph.
Two structural notes matter for anyone waiting on the record to fall. From 2024, the Hardest Shot stopped being a standalone event with its own winner and became one scored discipline within a combined competition, narrowing the field to all-rounders rather than specialists. And the event has not been staged every year: there was no All-Star weekend in 2010, 2013, 2021, 2025 or 2026. The next one is set for 5 and 6 February 2027, in a format built around players aged 25 or younger, which means whoever next threatens 108.8 mph will have to be young.
For context on where the ceiling actually sits, the AHL record is higher than the NHL one. Martin Frk was measured at 109.2 mph at the 2020 AHL All-Star Classic, and Denis Kulyash hit 110.3 mph at the 2011 KHL All-Star Game. Chara’s 108.8 is the NHL competition record, not a world record.
The hardest shot in the Stanley Cup playoffs
| Playoffs | Player | Team | Hardest shot | Metric | When it happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Victor Hedman | Tampa Bay Lightning | 101.63 mph | 163.56 km/h | 24 June 2022, Stanley Cup Final at Colorado |
| 2023 | Radko Gudas | Florida Panthers | 101.73 mph | 163.72 km/h | 7 May 2023, vs Toronto |
| 2024 | Josh Manson | Colorado Avalanche | 103.53 mph | 166.62 km/h | 17 May 2024, vs Dallas |
| 2025 | Colin Miller | Winnipeg Jets | 99.74 mph | 160.52 km/h | 24 April 2025, at St. Louis |
| 2026 | John Carlson | Anaheim Ducks | 102.72 mph | 165.31 km/h | 26 April 2026, vs Edmonton |
John Carlson’s 102.72 mph for Anaheim in April 2026 carries a wrinkle of its own. He spent the first 55 games of that season in Washington and arrived in Anaheim at the trade deadline, so the hardest shot of the 2026 playoffs came from a player who had been a Capital ten weeks earlier.
Where the league average is going
The same system that reports the record also reports what an average NHL skater’s hardest shot of the season looks like, and that number has been falling while the record has been rising.
| Season | League average, hardest shot | Season’s record |
|---|---|---|
| 2021-22 | 84.09 mph | 101.95 mph |
| 2022-23 | 84.87 mph | 101.71 mph |
| 2023-24 | 84.52 mph | 102.59 mph |
| 2024-25 | 83.92 mph | 106.00 mph |
| 2025-26 | 83.62 mph | 103.51 mph |
The average peaked in 2022-23 at 84.87 mph and then fell in each of the three seasons that followed, down to 83.62 mph, a drop of 1.25 mph. Over the same stretch, the individual record climbed from 101.71 mph to 103.51 mph.
Why Connor McDavid is not on the list
The best player in the world has never led the league in shot speed, and in 2025-26 his hardest tracked shot was 82.05 mph, which placed him in the 31st percentile. That is below the league average of 83.62 mph for that season, and it was the only time in his five seasons that his hardest shot fell short of the league average. In the four seasons before it, he sat between the 51st and the 67th percentile, with a personal best of 88.88 mph.
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