LONGEST NAMES IN NHL HISTORY

Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond played 41 NHL games. His name runs 26 letters, more than any other player in league history. The longest last name belongs to Jordan Lavallee-Smotherman at 18 letters, a player with four NHL games to his name.

Both records come from the same source: every name in the league’s career records, all 8,718 players from 1917-18 through 2025-26, counted letter by letter.

Every name below is 20 letters or longer. Ties break by career games, which is why the 22-letter group is ordered by NHL experience rather than alphabet.

The gap between first and second is two letters, then the list flattens. Five players sit on 22 letters and four of them have fewer than 30 NHL games. Pierre-Edouard Bellemare is the exception in that group at 700 games.

Six of the ten are hyphenated or written as two words. Bellemare, Damphousse, DiDomenico and Namestnikov reach the list on single-word surnames.

The surname list runs shorter than the full-name list because first names do a lot of the work in the record above. Lavallee-Smotherman’s 18 letters are the ceiling, and only four surnames in league history pass 15.

John Brackenborough also reaches 14 letters, but his seven NHL games put him eleventh once ties are broken.

Two entries are single surnames written as two words: Forsbacka Karlsson and Gustafsson Nyberg. Split either one apart and it drops off this list.

The most famous long surname in hockey does not make the top ten. Vanbiesbrouck, the name John Vanbiesbrouck carried through 882 games and a Vezina Trophy, runs 13 letters, which ties him with ten other players below this table.

The all-time lists are settled. The current league is a smaller pool, 760 players marked active when the career records were refreshed on 2026-10-18.

Behind Brandsegg-Nygård the field thins out fast: the next active full names share 20 letters, and no other active surname reaches 15. The active list is short on veterans, and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is the exception: 13 letters, the same length as Vanbiesbrouck, across more than 1,000 games. Most of the other active leaders are recent arrivals, which is why the active record sits four letters under the all-time mark.

Plotted across every player in league history, the two distributions peak five buckets apart, and the long-name tail belongs almost entirely to full names.

Last names cluster at 6 letters, with 2,007 players in that bucket and 1,838 at 7. Full names peak at 11 letters with 1,591 players. From there the shapes diverge. A surname of 10 letters is already unusual, and a surname of 13 or more happens 22 times in a century of league records. Full names keep landing in double digits because first names add 4.9 letters on average.

Past 19 letters, no full-name bucket holds more than 14 players. That is the shape of a record: not a trend line, just a handful of names at the edge of what a North American or European naming convention can produce.

The tail past ten letters

The wide view hides the part that matters for the record. Zoomed to last names of ten letters or more, the fall is steep: 360 players sit exactly on ten letters, 145 on eleven, then 43, 11, 5 and 2.

The line does not fall in a straight slope. Sixteen letters holds a single name, Gustafsson Nyberg, and seventeen holds two: Letourneau-Leblond and Forsbacka Karlsson. Those two are the reason the bar at 17 is taller than the bar at 16, and both sit a letter under Lavallee-Smotherman on 18.

Mystery Hockey sets the grid to the width of the surname, so length changes how a puzzle plays. A 10-letter surname gives ten chances to place a letter and a much narrower set of candidates than a 4-letter one. The curated puzzle pool tops out at ten letters, which means names like Lavallee-Smotherman never appear as an answer. Wide grids also show up rarely: the pool holds 16 ten-letter surnames against 98 at six letters.

For that tier, the guides that matter are the ten-letter last names guide and the seven-letter guide, both built on the letter frequencies inside each length. The full length analysis covers the goalie and skater split, and the tips page has the opening guesses for every width from three letters up.

One quirk of long names helps in a real puzzle: hyphenated surnames repeat letters. Letourneau-Leblond carries three Ls and two Ns, so a guess that lands those letters turns a long grid into a short list of candidates fast.

• Letters only. Hyphens, spaces, apostrophes and periods are not counted, so Vanbiesbrouck is 13 and Lavallee-Smotherman is 18 rather than 19 characters.
• Generational suffixes are dropped. Ab DeMarco Jr. counts as DeMarco.
• Particles stay with the surname. Van Riemsdyk, St. Louis, Del Zotto and Di Giuseppe count as written.
• Two-word surnames stay together when they are one family name. Forsbacka Karlsson, Gustafsson Nyberg, Eriksson Ek, Fisker Molgaard, Unger Sorum, Haman Aktell and Brandsegg-Nygard are each counted as a single surname.
• Everything else with three tokens is read as first name, middle name, surname. John Paul Kelly is Kelly.

All 8,718 names come from NHL career records through the 2025-26 season. Career games are NHL regular-season games only.

What is the longest last name in the NHL?

Lavallee-Smotherman, at 18 letters, belongs to Jordan Lavallee-Smotherman. He played four NHL games.

Two players share second place on 17 letters: Letourneau-Leblond and Forsbacka Karlsson.

What is the longest name in NHL history?

The longest full name is Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond at 26 letters, ahead of Jordan Lavallee-Smotherman on 24.

How many NHL players have a last name of 13 letters or more?

22, out of 8,718 players in league history. Surnames of ten letters or more add up to 570.

Do long names cluster at a position?

No. The longest names on both lists are mostly wingers and centres, with a goalie (Jean-Francois Damphousse) and a defenceman (Viking Gustafsson Nyberg) mixed in. Position does not predict name length, which the goalie and skater comparison covers in more detail.