By Joe Pohoryles
After a slow start to his 18th NHL season, Alex Ovechkin is kicking it up a notch. He failed to score in the first three games of the season for the first time since 2012-13, where he ended up finishing with a league-leading 32 goals in the 48-game lockout season.
Now he has eight goals through 14 games, and is riding a three-game goal streak for a Capitals team that is very injured and very mediocre with only one or two others besides Ovechkin generating offense.
The latest milestone in Ovechkin’s goal climb was reached during the 3-2 loss to Arizona on Nov. 5, in which he scored his 787th goal to pass Gordie Howe’s record of most goals with one team.
After tying the record the previous game, fittingly against Howe’s Detroit Red Wings, Ovi etched his name on a goal record that I believe to be the most impressive behind the all-time one.
18 years with one franchise, which will ultimately be 21 by the end of his contract, is a feat so rare that it takes a special type of player to achieve it. So few players play that long in professional sports at all, so sticking with one team is all the more impressive.
Only 18 players have spent their entire career with one team for 18+ years, including three active players (Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, Patrice Bergeron). Of the 15 inactive players, only seven played into the 21st century.
There will certainly be others in the near future to reach this mark, but how many of those players will score as prolifically as Ovechkin? With so much movement in the free agency of today and increasing player empowerment, it feels as if fewer players stick with the same team forever than it has been in the past.
People thought Wayne Gretzky’s goal record was unbreakable, but it clearly is a possibility. However, with this one, 787 goals (now 788 and counting) with a single team just seems like something we will never see again.
Hopefully, Ovechkin will stay in Washington for the rest of his career. It appears it will end that way, but we can never rule out a situation like the man he just passed on the list. Howe spent 25 years in Detroit, before spending some time in the WHA, and one final year in the NHL with Hartford, scoring his final 15 goals at 51 years old to put him at 801 all-time.
Speaking of 801, that’s the next milestone to watch (after 800, of course). With Ovechkin just 14 goals away from taking sole possession of second on the NHL’s all-time goal list, I can try to forecast when that will occur.
Ovechkin’s 50 goals in 77 games last year was good enough for .649 goals per game. After picking up from this year’s slow start, he’s scoring at a rate of .571 GPG. If he falls somewhere in between those two rates, he should pass Howe before the end of the calendar year.
I would expect somewhere in between the Capitals Dec. 23 game against the Winnipeg Jets and New Year’s Eve against the Montreal Canadiens. If his pace slows down, it should come in the earliest days of 2023, but if I had to make a specific prediction, I will say Dec. 29 against the Ottawa Senators, so mark your calendars.
What would be truly spectacular is if he enters that game with 799 goals and scores a hat trick, reaching 800 then tying and passing Howe all in the same game. No matter how those moments happen, it will be special to witness, and potentially the last major milestone before passing Gretzky himself (should it come to be).
So enjoy the next couple months, and hope the Capitals can embody Ovechkin’s climb as the try to pull themselves back into a competitive standing.
Cover Photo Credit: The Canadian Press
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