CHICAGO -- Jeff Carter, at 36 years old, seems to hit new milestone achievements fairly regularly these days.
He scored his 400th goal in the Penguins' second game of the season on Oct. 14 against the Panthers in Sunrise, Fla. He skated in his 1,100th NHL game Nov. 4 at home against the Flyers. And here at the United Center in the 3-2 shootout loss to the Blackhawks on Tuesday night, he scored both of his team's goals -- his 401st and 402nd -- to claim a spot on the league's all-time top 100 list, tied with Shane Doan, Paul Kariya and John Ogrodnick.
I asked Carter what it means to make list.
"It means I'm old," he quipped. "I played a lot of hockey. Something pretty special to me, I guess. I didn't realize I was that close. A lot of great players in this game, and hopefully here I can just keep building on that."
Carter's first goal of the game was this redirect of what was either an attempted shot or pass from Jake Guentzel that didn't quite go as planned, but ended up behind Marc-Andre Fleury regardless:
"We talk about plays before the drop, before we go out there," Carter said of that goal. "It wasn't clean, what we were trying to do. I was just trying to get to the net and I saw him kind of spinning and throwing it and just tried to get my stick in there. I got a piece of it."
Carter's second goal was first reviewed to ensure that it did in fact go between the goal posts and not under one as it became dislodged, but it was quickly confirmed by video replay:
Carter said that he was pretty confident from the beginning that the goal would count.
"From my view, it looked like the net was still in the moorings when it crossed," he said.
Carter is one of seven active players to be in the top 100 goal-scorers in league history, and two of the other seven are his teammates. He joins Alex Ovechkin (741), Sidney Crosby (486), Steven Stamkos (446), Joe Thornton (426), Evgeni Malkin (424) and Patrick Kane (409).
The next significant milestone for Carter would likely be reaching 800 career points. He's currently sitting at 769 in his career, 31 away from the marker. It's not unreasonable that he'd hit that mark this season, given that he put up 30 points in just 54 games last season.
When Carter hit the 400-goal mark in Florida, Mike Sullivan spoke of Carter's legacy and impact not just in terms of his goal-scoring ability, but also in terms of his character.
"It's hard for me to articulate what he means to our team, especially right now," Sullivan said. "He's just a high character person. He's a great person, he fit into our dressing room from the first day he walked in. The fact that he scored 400 goals is just an indication of how good of a hockey player he is, and how good of a player he is for so long. I think he's playing great hockey for us right now.
"He means so much to this team."
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Jeff Carter celebrates his 402nd career goal on Tuesday night against the Blackhawks in Chicago.
