By Joe Pohoryles
For the Washington Capitals and Alex Ovechkin, it’s been a rough start to the 2023-24 season. The Capitals currently sit fifth in the Metropolitan Division at 5-4-1 and they take on the Florida Panthers tonight at 7:30 pm. The biggest news so far this season is Nicklas Backstrom stepping away from the game, and he’s reportedly expected to miss the rest of the season at minimum, which has made a bad start feel even worse.
To say it’s been a rough start for Ovechkin individually might be an exaggeration, as he leads the team with eight points through 10 games, but just two of those are goals.
His two goals tie the worst 10-game goal-scoring start to a season in his career, and is his worst start in 11 years. He also started the season with two goals through 10 games in 2008-09 and 2012-13, and has never started with fewer than five in any other season.
The good news about those two outlier seasons? He still ended up leading the NHL in goals in each of those seasons, finishing with 56 in 2008-09 and 32 in the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season.
However, this year, at age 38, a Rocket Richard doesn’t appear to be the likeliest outcome, especially with the way players like Auston Matthews and Nikita Kucherov have been scoring. That said, this is still Alex Ovechkin, and even at the later stage of his career, he’s bound to pick up the pace eventually.
With 824 career goals, he’s now exactly 71 away from breaking Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goals record. His current pace, if he plays 75 games, would put him at just 15 on the season and 837 overall. Ovechkin has never come close to scoring just 15 goals in a full 82-game season – his lowest is 32 in 2010-11 – so ending the year at 837 seems like the bare-minimum, worst-case scenario.
Assuming he picks the pace up to his recent scoring average (.595 goals per game across the past three seasons) and plays around 65 more games, he should finish the year with about 40 goals, putting his career total at 862, which is 33 away from breaking the record.
Even after a slow start to this season, Ovechkin still has a realistic shot to hit the 40-goal mark based on his recent history. If he can do that, and stay healthy throughout this season and next, breaking the record near the end of 2024-25 would feel like a foregone conclusion rather than a possibility.
There’s still plenty of time to go with plenty of opportunity for things to change, for worse or for better, but not even his worst start in 11 years should be enough to raise alarm bells just yet. Now it’s all about how he finishes the calendar year.
The Wildcard 