A five-game goal streak for Alex Ovechkin is exactly what the Washington Capitals (and Capitals fans) have been wishing for. Ovechkin helped the team earn three out of four points in their most difficult weekend of the season. He sits at 835 goals in his career and he’s on pace to crack 20 this season.
After a worrying start to the season, it seems Ovechkin has finally arrived. Something has changed, and we need to figure out what.
There’s two ways to approach this, and both are valid. First is anecdotally. Here are all five of the goals from Ovechkin’s goal-scoring streak.
Goal 1: An outside slapshot on the power play
Worth noting that this was not a one-timer, as in Ovechkin’s typical power-play shot, and it came from well above his usual spot.
Goal 2: A one-timer set up by Dylan Strome
Dylan Strome did the hard work up close, making a wise, split-second decision to go for the pass instead of the shot.
Goal 3: An Ovi Shot from the Ovi Spot
The primary assist on this one belongs not to Ovi’s normal setup man, John Carlson, but to Rasmus Sandin.
Goal 4: An empty-netter after beating Hampus Lindholm
Empty-netters have a bad reputation, but they basically guarantee wins.
Goal 5: A deflection during 5v5 after Oshie steals the puck
This was a brilliant sequence for TJ Oshie and Dylan Strome, both the steal and the passes before the shot.
Three of those goals came thanks to excellent support from Ovechkin’s teammates, Strome, Oshie, and Sandin in particular. That’s a point I cannot emphasize enough. For more than a year now, Ovechkin has been lacking the top-end support he needs to truly activate his offense. That ultimately is a failure of roster construction and a stubborn, doomed hope that Evgeny Kuznetsov could turn it around. But exceptional efforts of late from the players sharing the ice with Ovechkin have bucked that trend, setting up Ovechkin properly, finally.
But the essential difference in Ovechkin’s goal-scoring streak is bit more obvious. Below is a graph of Ovechkin’s individual five-on-five offense over the last three seasons. The blue line is Ovechkin’s expected goals, basically his shot attempts weighted by shot quality. The spiky red line is actual goals.
During five-on-five play, Alex Ovechkin’s individual offense, measured by expected-goal rate, is down by 30 percent from last season and down 14 percent from the season before that. Ovechkin’s actual goal-scoring has cratered — down by 69 percent from last season. The difference between process (i.e. xG) and results (i.e. goals) is huge. Of the top 320 forwards by ice time this season, Ovechkin ranks 289th in the gap between his xG rate and actual goal rate.
In short, Ovechkin has had a noteworthy drop in shot quality — but a profound, precipitous, and painful drop in hitting the back of the net. When asked why he wasn’t scoring, Ovechkin took the blame in a thoughtful answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “Obviously, it’s up to me what I have to do better to get those shots [going] in. But how I said, sometimes maybe you’re going to have 100 percent chance, but you have to use it. And then when the first goal goes in, you feel much comfortable and you feel much, much better at your game.”
Personally, I think he could have stopped after “I don’t know.” Aside from rumors of injury, Ovechkin still looked dangerous to me in the offensive zone. (Everywhere else is another matter.) His attempt rate dipped 7.3 percent, and the share of his attempts that got blocked rose by 26.8 percent, but nothing in that spelled catastrophic collapse to me. He was simply… well, you’ve probably guessed by now what word I want to use, but I’m not going to use it yet.
| TOI | Goals | xG | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before streak | 598 | 2 | 7.8 | -5.8 |
| During streak | 71 | 2 | 0.7 | +1.4 |
The numbers I’ve cited are for five-on-five play only, which make up just two of the three goals in the streak, but the pattern applies to the power play too.
Ovechkin went from “losing” about one goal every four games to actually overperforming for once. Going by pure shooting percentage, Ovechkin rose from 2.4 percent, which would be bad even for a defender with a muffin for a shot, up to 18 percent, which is well above Ovechkin’s recent seasons (about 13 percent). Now, I don’t think the 18 percent is very important — the numerator is just two goals — but the 2.4 percent is critical to understanding why Ovechkin hadn’t been scoring before.
He simply had not ridden the camel yet.
