There are a lot of impressive things about Alex Ovechkin’s climb to the top of the NHL’s all-time goal-scoring leaderboard. The first, and most obvious, is just the actual number itself.
Scoring 895 goals in the NHL is, quite honestly, an absurd accomplishment. Only three players have ever topped the 800-goal mark in NHL history. Only eight are over 700 goals.
By the time Ovechkin’s career ends, he will likely go well beyond 900 goals, depending on how long he wants to play.
Scoring that many goals over a 20-year stretch required at minimum a 45-goal-per-season pace, which is almost difficult to comprehend. It did not even seem like it was possible until this season and right up until he actually moved ahead of Wayne Gretzky’s record.
It took an amazing combination of consistency, durability, talent and even some luck to simply stay healthy enough to keep going.
But that does not even begin to scratch the surface on how impressive this actually is.
To truly take in the accomplishment, you need to consider how pretty much everything in Ovechkin’s career was stacked against him when it came to actually getting the record. That includes the league itself and the way the game was played, to unforeseen global circumstances, to the NHL’s perpetual labor stoppages, to even his own team and the narratives surrounding his style of play.
In the end, none of it mattered. He has just been too much and too unstoppable.
While Gretzky played the bulk of his career in the highest-scoring era the NHL has ever seen, Ovechkin played the bulk of his prime years in one of the lowest-scoring eras.
Between 2010 and 2017, the NHL re-entered a dead-puck era where offense was completely sucked out of the sport. Everything was about structure, systems, defense, elite goaltending and a decrease in power-play opportunities that dropped goal-scoring to insanely low levels.
For context on that: In the post-Original-Six era (starting with the 1967 season), nine of the 15-lowest goal-scoring seasons in the NHL came during Ovechkin’s career, including six of the 10-lowest. Most of those seasons were in the mid-2010s when Ovechkin was at his peak.
It was not an offensive era. It was not an era built for goal-scoring. There were years where nobody other than him came close to 50 goals. Only a handful of players could even approach 40 goals.
It was around that time that the Capitals — in the middle of several postseason disappointments — tried to become a more defensive team and tried to get Ovechkin to sacrifice offense in the name of being a more complete, two-way player. It was a disaster for everybody, including both the Capitals and Ovechkin himself.
When it wasn’t playing-style issues, it was the fact that he simply missed a lot of potential games. Not because of injury, but because the NHL lost a significant number of games to the Covid-19 pandemic and multiple lockouts.
The 2019-20 season was cut short due to the pandemic, resulting in a shortened 56-game season in 2020-21. Those two seasons alone took away 40 potential games.
Before that was the 2012-13 NHL lockout, which cut the season to 48 games, taking away 34 games.
Between those three shortened seasons, that is an entire season’s worth of games and potentially another 50-plus goals.
Then there is the question of the 2004-05 season, which could have been Ovechkin’s rookie season had he decided to immediately come over from Russia, that was entirely cancelled due to a lockout.
With an extra 80-100 games, it is a not a stretch to think he would already be well over 950 goals and potentially closing in on 1,000 for his career. That does not even get into the fact he missed more than a month this very season to a broken leg, the first major injury of his career. And he is still over 40 goals in 61 games at the age of 39.
Given all of those factors, he was already the best goal-scorer the NHL had ever seen even before Sunday’s record-setting goal. Getting to the top of the list simply removes all doubt and discussion.
