Claude Giroux is the most overlooked name on the NHL's active career points list, and it isn't close.
As the 2026-27 season gets going, Giroux sits eighth among active scorers, ahead of Nathan MacKinnon and Nikita Kucherov. Yet he barely comes up in conversations about the great scorers of this generation. You'll hear plenty about McDavid's pace and Ovechkin's chase before anyone mentions that Giroux has quietly scored his way into the top ten of everyone still playing.
Nobody notices because he spent his prime on Philadelphia teams that were good but not great, in and out of the playoffs, without the career-defining Cup run, and now plays out his thirties in Ottawa, a market the league's coverage treats as background noise. It's a narrative problem, built by a highlight-and-record-chase machine that only cares about what's happening in real time tonight.
Tavares gets the same treatment with a sneer attached. He's become shorthand for everything Toronto hasn't won, which is a lazy way to ignore a player who has compiled a genuinely elite career on pure, repeatable volume. He's never had a hundred-point season; his career high came in his first year in Toronto. But his scoring rate, year after year, is the kind of number that stacks into a Hall-of-Fame résumé whether or not it ever produces a flashy single-season line. When he actually had a real run at a hundred-point season recently, it registered as a trivia question.
And Jamie Benn. As of late October he's sitting just shy of 1,000 career points, a captain who has given Dallas his entire career, inching toward a club very few players ever join. He signed another one-year deal this summer, and the loudest coverage he got was the transaction note announcing it. A thousand points deserves more than that.
Career point totals reward longevity and games played as much as talent, so you can't just read the leaderboard top to bottom and call it a ranking of skill. That's why McDavid's spot is the jaw-dropper: he's sixth among active scorers despite playing hundreds of fewer games than the five men above him. Nobody's confusing accumulation with genius there.
But the same logic cuts the other way for Giroux, Tavares and Benn. Playing at a high level long enough to climb past most of your peers is a skill. Staying healthy and productive into your mid-thirties is its own kind of greatness, and it's the kind the sport has decided is dull.
That's the mistake. Modern hockey coverage chases spectacle and record-watch, and it has almost no appetite for players whose case is built on a decade of just being really good. Giroux, Tavares and Benn are underrated because the people deciding who gets talked about find compiling boring. Scoring more than almost everyone who ever played should not require a fireworks show to get noticed.
