Thanks to his two-goal effort during Tampa Bay's 6-1 thrashing of the Boston Bruins on Tuesday night, Steven Stamkos became the first player in the NHL this season to reach the 50-goal mark, doing so for the second time in his career.

He scored 51 during the 2009-10 season.

Stamkos is running away with the goal-scoring race this season, and after Tuesday's action will be 12 goals ahead of the second leading goal-scorer in the league, Pittsburgh's Evgeni Malkin .

Scoring 50 goals is always an impressive accomplishment, but to do so in this league, with goal scoring at the levels they're currently at, is pretty amazing. Especially when he's likely to be the only player to reach that mark this season.

Malkin is the only other player with even an outside chance, and he would need to score 12 goals in 14 games to make it happen. And that's asking quite a bit.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Stamkos' season is that 40 of his goals have come at even-strength.

Since the start of the 1997-98 season the only players to score 40 even-strength goals in a season have been Alex Ovechkin (43 during the 2007-08 season), Pavel Bure (45 in '99-00) and Teemu Selanne (41 in '97-98).

Simply put, this is one of the best goal-scoring seasons we've seen in quite a long time.

And it's worth asking one more time: can he score 60 this year?

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