Ovechkin the greatest goal scorer in hockey?
Eight is great, if you only measure goals
There is no magic to turning 30, or 40, except they are odometer birthdays. It’s the roundness of the number, the crossing over into a new place. Where have I been, and where am I going?
Alexander Ovechkin scored goals number 599 and 600 Monday night, and sits 20th all time. If he plays long enough, well … fifth overall is 131 goals, or five lowend Ovechkin seasons, away. Gretzky’s record of 894 isn’t close, but it could be reached.
And as he rolls over these round hills, we can revisit the central fact of his career: Alexander Ovechkin is the greatest goal scorer ever to play hockey, and it is a blessing and a curse.
“I like Ovi: He’s got a real personality, he’s got a love for the game, a real zest and energy for life, and I think he’s great for the game,” Leafs coach Mike Babcock said. “It’s amazing: the puck just goes in when he has it. I mean, he can get it off by the legs, through the legs, around people like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“With great players, sometimes we take for granted what they do,” says TSN analyst Ray Ferraro, who scored 408 NHL goals in his 18-year career. “We’re always measuring everybody off of what they do, and I think we kind of forget the reason we do that is because what they’re doing is special.”
The only players to reach 600 in fewer games than Ovechkin were Gretzky, Lemieux and Brett Hull. But it was easier to score in the 1980s and 1990s, back when the front of the net was, as Ferraro puts it, a “woodchopper’s ball,” but goalies might as well have smoked cigarettes during games. If you adjust for the results of his era, as Hockey-Reference.com does, Ovechkin has scored faster and more easily than anybody who has ever lived. In his first 990 NHL games — 13 seasons — Ovechkin has scored 0.697 goals per game, adjusted for era. That’s about 57.2 adjusted goals per 82 games played.
By comparison, Mario Lemieux’s 915-game career number was 55.2; Gretzky, in his first 13 seasons and 999 games, was at 49.8; Hull, 51.4; Pavel Bure, 54; Mike Bossy, 50.3. Among contemporaries Steven Stamkos is at 52, and Patrik Laine in Winnipeg, the most natural heir, at 52.5. That’s an elite list, and if you believe a player can only be measured within the context of his era, Ovechkin tops them all.
And it puts him squarely at the intersection of how we measure hockey players. Of the 18 players with more than one Hart Trophy, only Ovechkin has never won a Stanley Cup, or even played for one. You can go back to Gordie Howe and of the skaters who won a Hart, only Ovi, Eric Lindros, Henrik Sedin, Joe Thornton and young Connor McDavid haven’t won a Cup. Nobody has achieved the heights of Ovi, without a ring.
Which makes him perhaps the most uniquely polarizing figure of this hockey age. What is greatness?
“I mean, there are series where he’s been great and they lose,” says Ferraro, who called several of those earlier Capitals playoff losses. “There are series where he hasn’t been great, and they lose. And hell, the Caps have found every conceivable way to lose. And you can point at him, but I don’t, necessarily, because there are some guys there whose playoff numbers don’t correspond to their regular-season numbers.”
That’s a central question of the Ovechkin era: He has been on three Presidents’ Trophy-winning teams, won three Harts and three Ted Lindsay awards as the best player chosen by players, and has never been out of the second round. How much is his fault? Ovechkin had eight goals and 14 points in that seven-game loss to Pittsburgh in 2009. He had 10 points in a seven-game loss to Montreal the next year and 10 shots on goal in Game 7. He had seven goals on 85 shots in backto-back-to-back series losses to prime Henrik Lundqvist and the Rangers. He had 14 shot attempts in Washington’s Game 6 loss to Pittsburgh in 2016. All of it for naught.
Last year, playing on a Nazem Kadri-injured knee, might have been the nadir. In that Game 7 loss to Pittsburgh last year at home, with their Cup dreams on the line, the Capitals had six shots on goal in the third period. In that span, Ovechkin had one shot blocked, and his lone shot on goal was a slap shot from the neutral zone with nine seconds left in a 2-0 game. The Capitals had a road to a Cup, and dissolved. How much was his fault?
Some. Not all. It’s hockey. You need a whole team.
“Because he’s the unquestioned leader on that team, he’s going to wear it, justified or not,” says Ferraro. “It’s Crosby and Ovechkin, Ovechkin and Crosby, and it’s been that since the moment he came into the league, and it’ll be that until they leave, and they’ll be laid side by side together.”
That’s the solution to the riddle. It’s because he’s great that he gets blamed. The greater he is, the heavier the weight. It might not be fair, but it’s the game. Alexander Ovechkin has been a gift to hockey, and as he sails further into the realm of hockey immortals, that will be his cross to bear. Unless he wins.