At age 39, Alex Ovechkin broke his leg and scored 44 goals. Come on. COME. ON.
By the Numbers
44
Goals
29
Assists
65
Games played
18
Minutes per game
On-ice percentages
49%
Shot attempts
45%
Expected goals
59%
Actual goals
Isolated Impact by HockeyViz
About this visualization: This image by Micah Blake McCurdy of hockeyviz.com shows how the player has impacted play when on the ice. At the top of the image is the team’s offense (even strength at left, power play at right) and at bottom is the team’s defense (with penalty kill at bottom right). In each case, red/orange blobs mean teams shoot for more from that location on the ice, and blue/purple means less. In general, a good player should have red/orange blobs near the opponent’s net at top, and blue/purple blobs near their own team’s net at bottom. The distributions in middle show how the player compares to league average at individual finishing, setting up teammates to score, and taking and drawing penalties. The number at center is Synthetic Goals: a catch-all number for the player’s impact.
Player Card by All Three Zones
About this player card: This image from Corey Sznajder of All Three Zones shows how the player compares to league averages in different microstats in the defensive, neutral, and offensive zones. Blue bars mean the player has a higher rate in that statistic compared to league average, and orange means a lower rate. The numbers are Z-scores, also known as standard deviations, indicating how far the number is from league average, where more than two standard deviations means the player is on the extreme edge of the league.
Player Card by Evolving Hockey
About this player card: This card from Josh and Luke of Evolving Hockey compares the player to league averages based on their impact on on-ice statistics. GAR means “goals above replacement,” where “replacement” means an average player called up from the AHL. xGAR is the same figure but assuming league-average goaltending. The numbers at top are the player’s percentile ranks overall and then for offense and defense alone.
Player Overview by NHL Edge
About this visualization: The NHL’s advanced statistics program, Edge, tracks player and puck movement. At left are the player’s numbers in various statistics along with the average number for that same stat among players of the same position and the player’s percentile rank in it. At right is a radar chart for various statistics, where the bigger the shape the better the player performs in those measures.
Fan Happiness Survey
About this visualization: At three times during the season, RMNB conducted an open survey with readers, asking the following question for each player: “On a scale from 1 to 5, how HAPPY are you to have this player on the team?” The numbers above show the average score for the player in each survey period.
Slavoj Žižek on Ovechkin
The GOAT? A masterpiece of ideological theater! Man-as-beast, the inversion of man’s nobility . It’s a lie, a Hollywood, but we believe it as The Real, as Lacan might say, a myth, erotically charged, sniff, ready to burst.
Peter’s Take
Alex Ovechkin scored 44 goals this season. Any discussion of his year has to begin and end with that fact. No one at his age, 39, has scored more, and only one guy — Gordie Howe, obviously — ever came close.
Forty-four goals is a profound accomplishment in any context. Since 2008, forwards have played 5,891 seasons with at least 600 minutes, and 5,852 of them had less than 44 goals. Alex Ovechkin scored 44 goals, and he’s 39, and, oh yeah, he broke his leg in the middle of it.
I’m semi-pro at writing about this, and I still don’t know how to write about this. Sports media is rife with hyperbole. It’s tiresome, but in this case it’s essential. I don’t know how to discuss Ovechkin in non-grandiose terms. People throw around “one-of-a-kind” so much that I started to call him sui generis, like a dickhead, because I feared people would tune me out. “Generational” is a bad one too. I hear twenty years is the length of a generation, and it’s the length of Ovechkin’s career as well. Ovechkin’s undeniably been the best scorer in that span, but Crosby and McDavid are legends too – if you can even count McDavid in the same generation. And they’re different kinds of players. Depending on who you ask, they’re the better kinds of players.
I’m not going to go through the receipts again; you know the gist. Ovechkin is not a complete player, he’s a defensive liability, he’s a one-trick pony. When someone says this, what they’re secretly admitting is they don’t really understand Alex Ovechkin. I’d bet, along with my colleagues here at RMNB, I’ve written more about him than anyone else, so let me break it down in my way, which involves spreadsheets – who would have guessed.
We have this idea of expected goals, which we can use to measure which team has the puck more – and which has the puck better, so to speak – in any given situation. Let’s say that situation is when Ovi is on the ice. The blue bars are the difference between the Caps’ rate of expected goals minus their opponents’. Up is good, down is bad.
According to this graph, one of two things must be true: either Alex Ovechkin has been a negative-impact player for a decade, or the insight gained from this information is imperfect.
So let’s discard the “advanced” statistics. Let’s go by real goals.
That’s a more positive picture. The Caps have reliably outscored opponents when Ovechkin’s on the ice. There have some lulls and there have been two very bad seasons: last year and 2014, but on the whole it’s clear that Ovechkin helps more than he hurts.
But that still doesn’t capture it. So this last one is my own hack: it’s Washington’s actual-goal rate, minus opponents’ expected-goal rate. In other words: give Ovechkin credit for his scoreboard-observed offense without punishing him or rewarding him if the Caps had bad or good goaltending. Basically, pretend it’s league average goaltending behind him.
Unless things are going real bad (i.e. the whole team is a mess), Ovechkin consistently lifts his team. To me, this is the key.
Discussion of Ovechkin too often misses the point on either of two fronts. One front is if we treat him like any other player – as if a one-timer from the faceoff dot off Ovechkin’s stick is the same as one off Lars Eller’s stick. That’s obviously not true, but any analysis that depends entirely on shot volume or expected-goal models would miss this. (That’s not a criticism of those models, and their creators would be the first to say that’s both a known limitation and the result of a wise intentional design choice. Rigorous analysts don’t make this mistake, and I’ve got a 12-year-long running series about how this kind of stat is the beginning of analysis, not the totality of it.)
The second way discussion of Ovechkin misses the point is more widespread, and it’s partially my fault. We all caricature Ovechkin as a hockey caveman: a hit hard, puck-go-in-net brute – a brutal man-of-few-words – because that’s a comforting way to pretend we understand the man. But it’s a criminal oversimplification, and it elides the reality, and I mean this next part with absolute sincerity: Alex Ovechkin is a world-historic hockey genius.
On every play of every shift of every game in every season for two decades, he’s performed a lightning-fast cost-benefit analysis on how he should execute. And in that analysis, this is his first principle: I am better at scoring than any player on this ice sheet. Also planet. So he trades off the risk of allowing opponents a chance at scoring because he knows he can do it better. It’s okay to be defensively deficient because he’s offensively omniscient.
And in this decision, consistently, since the damn Bush administration, he has been validated. He has been vindicated even.
Ovechkin is not Canadian, and English is not his first language, and one time he wore sweat pants over blue jeans, but that doesn’t mean he’s not brilliant in his domain. When he says he love to celebration, he love to goals, we smile because that’s disarming and charming, but don’t let that trick you into thinking this man isn’t scheming every time he goes over the boards.
Good luck in my end of the ice, he thinks as he stares down his opponent, because I’m sure as shit going to score in yours.
And he did. 44 times. Alex Ovechkin scored 44 goals.
Ovi on RMNB
Oh god. Here we go again. This isn’t close to everything. This is just the best of the best, in my eyes.
- To Brian MacLellan, after the PLD trade: 👍
- From Brian MacLellan, on Ovechkin’s communication style: “He’s a big emoji guy. We got more emojis than dialogue.”
- From Dylan Strome, on Ovechkin’s communication style: “He’s a big meme guy so he’s sending me memes lots.”
- Ovechkin did not like playing defensively for Dale Hunter. Go figure.
- Ovechkin ranks 54th in ESPN’s top 100 professional athletes of the 21st century. Semin snubbed.
- On if he has more than $100 million: “Of course not”
- On beer: “I can’t imagine a [player] who says he doesn’t drink.“
- The fifth-oldest player in the NHL
- On the Screaming Eagle jersey: “It’s so good.”
- On tanks, juice: “I still have juice in my tank.“
- Carbery stands by double-shifting Ovi on the power play.
- PLD on being Ovi’s teammate: “You’re pretending to be him and 20 years later you’re playing with him.”
- The last RMNB story about Tony P, I hope.
- On the Selke Trophy for best defensive forward: “I need it.”
- Logan Thompson’s ig pfp.
Alex Ovechkin’s hat trick helps Caps beat Golden Knights 5-2
- ELF wants one more outdoor game between Ovi and Sid.
- On McDavid’s three-game suspension: “Sucks for him. Good for us.”
- No camels during break.
Alex Ovechkin scores 32nd career hat trick against Edmonton Oilers
- Darren Pang gaffed.
- He loaned Aliaksei Protas his car so that he could get to Hershey one time.
- The origin of the Ovi Spot.
- ESPN+ introduced the ‘OviCast’. I did not watch.
- April 11, 2025 was ‘Alex Ovechkin Day’ in DC.
- Shade from loffs opponents. Laine couldn’t care less about playing against his childhood idol. Demidov prefers Malkin. Okay guys.
- Nominated but snubbed for the Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy
- The Caps pranked Ryan Leonard into wearing Alex Ovechkin’s yellow laces.
- His rookie patch sold for $381,000.
- Trump brought up Ovi up OUT OF NOWHERE. Twice.
- Miro calls Ovechkin his second dad.
- I DO NOT CARE.
Alex Ovechkin and Connor McMichael spotted at casino in viral photo
The broken leg beat
- In November, Ovechkin went leg-on-leg with Utah’s Jack McBain.
- He did not blame McBain. “I’m sure it was unintentional.”
- Fractured fibula. Four to six weeks out.
- The team was upset.
- Meanwhile, he was at Wizards games, watching practice, going on road trips, helping with postgame stuff, etc.
- Evgeny Kuznetsov said Ovechkin had played through a lot of injuries but never talked about them.
- Just before Christmas, he was back in a, ahem, full-contact jersey.
Here’s Alex Ovechkin getting a hot dog during the Carolina Hurricanes game
- Wilson on Ovechkin’s not-so-much absence: “I could see him in the showers trying to listen to what was going on because typically, if you’re not playing, you’re supposed to kind of be away from the team, but as a captain and a guy that drives a lot of the fun around here, he wasn’t ever too far”
- On December 28, he was back.
- Carbery said it would be a “full go.”
Alex Ovechkin scores 869th career goal, an empty netter, in return from broken fibula
The goal record beat
- Thanks to Pascal Leclare.
- He could have gotten there sooner but he opted to give Protas a hat trick instead.
- Gary Bettman said he and Wayne Gretzky will being haunting Alex Ovechkin when he hit five goals away.
- Stat maniac Dylan Strome before the big goal: “I’m gonna get 35 straight assists and then not on that one.” (He got it.)
- 891
- 892
- 893
Alex Ovechkin ties Wayne Gretzky for the most goals in NHL history with 894
- He declined to score 895 on an empty net. Prob wanted to humiliate a goalie.
- “Best shower of my life“
- Crosby on the record-tying goal: “For anyone who is a fan of the game and appreciates what he’s doing, it’s pretty cool to see.”
- Chara on the record-tying goal: “I am still in awe and can’t describe how amazing this is.”
- Joe Beninati said he would be “crushed” if he couldn’t call Alex Ovechkin’s big goals. He called them.
Alex Ovechkin breaks Wayne Gretzky’s NHL goals record against Islanders with 895th career goal
- Seven-minute time limit on the celebration. Ha. No.
- Congratulations from Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, LeBron James, etc.
- Ilya Sorokin gave Alex Ovechkin his goalie stick. He didn’t seem bummed at all, to be honest.
- Ovechkin on his celebration: “Ice was bad today, so I fell.”
- Declined going on Fallon. Hero.
- This is a fun read.
- Gr8ness Pre-Game Ceremony
- Posing with Semin
- Ovechkin thanks Olie Kolzig for being part of his goal run. Not in the way you think.
- On Good Morning America.
The retirement beat
For this, it’s important to note which stories come from Russia and which come from the US.
- Ovi in the US: “I’m not retire yet.”
- Ovi in Russia: “In Russia, all my friends, relatives, Nastya’s relatives are here too. I feel more comfortable in Russia at the moment than there. … [When] our season is ending, and we want to fly home right away because we miss home, our family, our friends. . . I’m building a new house, in the Moscow region. I hope we’ll move next year. A normal little house.”
- Ovi in the US: “Well, I have one more year, and we’ll see what’s going to happen I’ll be honest with you, I love the team. I love being around the boys. As long as I can, I’ll try to stick around with my great body, how you said, in NHL.”
- Ovi in Russia, regarding signing another contract to score 1000 goals: “I don’t think so. . . We’ll see. Most likely, yes, to Dynamo [Moscow]. If health allows. It’s hard to plan for such a long term now.”
- Ovi in the US: “Be honest (with) you, I haven’t thought about it yet, but we’ll see what’s going to happen. Obviously, I’m going to try to do my best to be able to do well next year, and we’ll see.”
- Nastya in Russia: “Alexander still has a contract for a year. So we will play the next season, and then fly back to live in Moscow, to our homeland. We will stay in Russia, yes.”
- Brian MacLellan: “I think we’ve learned with him to leave possibilities open all the time. I think he had a fun year this year. He really enjoyed himself. The team had a lot of fun together and was successful, and I think he’ll come back, and we’ll see where it goes from there. Hopefully, he has another good year.”
- Dynamo definitely definitely very badly wants him. They are ready to negotiate.
- A source, via RG Media, gives what I think is the most accurate description: “Alex has not made a decision to retire from the NHL in 2026. His position remains the same – he has a contractual obligation to play the 2025-26 NHL season, after which he will decide whether to remain with Washington or not.”
Let’s end it with this:
Capitals surprise goal-scoring GOAT Alex Ovechkin with literal goats at ‘The Gr8 City Celebration’
Your Turn
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