Using remarkable durability and unprecedented consistency, Alex Ovechkin is 202 goals away from tying Wayne Gretzky for the all-time goals record (894).
After scoring eight goals in three games and notching consecutive hat tricks, the 34-year-old Ovechkin passed Mario Lemieux (690) and tied Steve Yzerman (692) for ninth all-time late last week.
To put Ovechkin’s goal-scoring dominance in perspective over the last 15 seasons, The Athletic Detriot’s Prashanth Iyer created an animated bar graph starting in the 2005-06 season. Ovechkin has amassed an astonishing 238-goal lead over the next closest player (Sidney Crosby) by video’s end, which is the Capitals’ bye week in January 2020.
Video
Let's try again one more time (with a lot less love for Kovalchuk as i stop counting his 2010-2011 season 3 times) and look at Ovechkin's goal scoring rate relative to his contemporaries. The man is just unreal pic.twitter.com/ooIh5qlvRg
— Prashanth Iyer (@iyer_prashanth) January 22, 2020
During this video’s span, Ovechkin scored 50 goals during eight of his 15 seasons in the NHL and won eight Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophies as the league’s leading goal-scorer. Ovechkin is also only the second player in NHL history to score 30 goals in each of his first 15 seasons in the NHL. Ovechkin’s worst seasons in the NHL are also just as remarkable: he’s scored under 40 goals in only four seasons (one of which was lockout-shortened) and his lowest goal total in one season is 32.
“I think the most impressive thing about this video is that Ovechkin has outlasted the players of old (Jagr, Heatley, Shanahan, etc) and withstood the rise of the next generation (Stamkos),” Iyer said to me. “As the years drag on, he pulls ahead by more and more goals over the second-place player. He could have retired in 2014-2015 and still have more goals than Sidney Crosby has as of today. It’s mind-boggling. He had 475 goals at the end of the 2014-15 season and Crosby’s at 454 now.”
Ovechkin is such a consistent goal scorer it’s hard to not take his greatness for granted. But as this bar graph illustrates, he’s simply the best – better than all the rest.
Headline photo: @Capitals/@iyer_prashanth
