It felt like there was no better opportunity for Alex Ovechkin to play catch up than Monday night’s game against the San Jose Sharks. The Sharks sport the league’s worst defense and a bottom-five penalty kill. Ovechkin attempted nine shots against them, with five on net, but none beat goaltender Mackenzie Blackwood. Ovechkin looked to have the edge on a first-period power play, taking maybe his cleanest shot from the Ovi Spot™ all season, only to ring the post.
Now, with five goals in eighteen games, Ovechkin is on pace to score just 23 goals this season. Or, put more bleakly, he’s on pace to break Wayne Gretzky’s goal record sometime during the 2026-27 season.
Ovechkin’s current goal pace of 23 would put him 49 shy of Gretzky at the season’s end. If that’s the new normal for Ovechkin, and he can score just that many from now on, he wouldn’t crack 894 until he was under a new contract.
This projection has two big, fraught assumptions. One is that Ovechkin plays full 82-game seasons, far from a guarantee for a player in his late 30s/early 40s. But the second assumption is the encouraging one: that Alex Ovechkin’s current goal pace is an accurate reflection of his offense now and into the future. I refuse to believe that.
Ovechkin has scored on only one of his 38 shots during five-on-five play, a 2.6 shooting percentage, or about 10 percentage points off recent seasons. On the power play, Ovechkin has scored one goal on 26 shots, a 3.9 shooting percentage, again about 10 points off recent seasons. If I had just two seconds to explain Ovechkin’s low scoring this season, I’d say “bad luck” and then I’d groan really loud like Charlie Brown.
Because under the goals, Ovechkin is still doing Ovechkin things. His individual offense rates haven’t dipped too far from recent seasons.
He’s attempting only two fewer shots per hour compared to last season, though he’s getting noticeably fewer from in the paint.
Ovechkin’s falloff in volume and quality seems to be a function of who his pivot is. He’s fared noticeably better with Dylan Strome (140 minutes) than with Evgeny Kuznetsov (78 minutes).
| Ovechkin rate | w/ Strome | w/ Kuznetsov |
|---|---|---|
| Attempts | 18.9 | 14.6 |
| High-danger chances | 3.9 | 1.5 |
| Scoring chances | 8.6 | 6.1 |
| Expected goals | 0.9 | 0.8 |
The only justification for playing Ovechkin with Kuznetsov is if you were hoping to showcase the latter for a trade, in which case both results and defensive play are sabotaging the project. If you want Ovechkin productive and your hockey team better overall, Strome is the right choice.
Goal pace is kind of silly in the early season. When a player scores two goals in the first game of the season, and then someone says they’re on pace for 164 goals, that’s up there with “expected by whom?” among my least favorite hockey bits. Ovechkin’s current goal pace is depressing, but I don’t see it as a reliable signal of the player’s current talent or condemnation to some grim fate. I see it in three parts:
- a reflection of terrible luck,
- a suggestion of better future results, and
- an obligation for the team to support him better
I admit I’m surprised the Capitals haven’t pursued that last one yet. Over the summer I framed Ovechkin’s chase for the goal record and the team’s general outlook as at odds with each other, but right now they’re perfectly in sync: Ovechkin’s low production is costing the team wins. They know what kind of players he needs for help, and they’ve got more than $7 million of salary-cap space to work with. Let’s go.
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Headline photo: Alan Dobbins/RMNB
