Back in October, when Alex Ovechkin used to score goals, I ran a simulation estimating his chances at getting 50 in 50. Yea, he really did score goals back then enough to inspire me to write that. The simulation had him scoring on average 42 goals (plus or minus 8 ) in an 82-game season, and while it seemed far-fetched at the time, here we are staring at a 30-goal season out of the Great 8. So why not see how absurd possible it would be for him to get the Ovechtrick.
For those of you that missed it, an Ovechtrick is a 9-goal game scored by Ovechkin. Those muckity mucks at Verizon are clever, eh?
To estimate his chances I will again use a Monte Carlo simulation to run 10,000 “games.” It starts with me using the shots on goal and shooting percentage during the regular season for Ovechkin during this season and the last two. Then I figure out how frequently these events occurred and let lady luck work her fickle magic.
As you would expect, the most frequent occurrence is the zero goal game, which happened in 6,493 games out of the 10,000 ran for the simulation, or 64.93%. Here are the rest:
Y-axis is frequency, X-axis is goals per game
Wayyyy on the right there are actually two games out of the 10,000 simulated where had Ovi recorded the Ovechtrick.
| Goals in a game | # of Simulations | % |
| 0 | 6,493 | 64.93% |
| 1 | 2,422 | 24.22% |
| 2 | 738 | 7.38% |
| 3 | 225 | 2.25% |
| 4 | 43 | 0.43% |
| 5 | 45 | 0.45% |
| 6 | 16 | 0.16% |
| 7 | 8 | 0.08% |
| 8 | 8 | 0.08% |
| 9 | 2 | 0.02% |
| Grand Total | 10,000 | 100.00% |
It could happen.
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