Five reasons Alex Ovechkin is way better at scoring goals than you think

Apr 9, 2025, 12:00 EDT

Washington Capitals left winger Alex Ovechkin

Credit: Apr 6, 2025; Elmont, New York, USA; Washington Capitals left wing Alex Ovechkin (8) scores a goal in the 2nd period against the New York Islanders at UBS Arena. The goal is the 895th of Ovechkin’s career, breaking the NHL all-time career goals record previously held by Wayne Gretzky.at UBS Arena. Mandatory Credit: Geoff Burke-Imagn Images

You may have heard that Alex Ovechkin broke the NHL’s goal-scoring record.

It’s certainly not the type of feat that can sneak up on anyone. Twenty years of relentless lasers, clappers, rockets, snipes, blasts and tucks yielded a defining moment in hockey history on Sunday afternoon.

While some fans needed that 895th flashing red light to make it official, let’s be honest: Ovechkin has long been the greatest goal scorer in NHL history. With the ‘Gr8 Chase’ completed and the torch officially passed from Wayne Gretzky, we’re putting the accomplishment in proper context and highlighting five reasons that Ovechkin occupies his own stratosphere of sniping.

Spoiler: no one is even close.

🚨 #1: Scoring Climate

When a lucky goal is scored, it’s often said ‘they don’t ask how.’ But they should ask when. Scoring climate is the overarching factor that puts Ovechkin’s goal scoring in another class. If you’re a regular to this space, we’ve explored Hockey-Reference’s era adjusted scoring and a simple stat I created called Inflation Factor.

We know that scoring a goal in 1981 is not the same as scoring a goal in 2013. Or 2025. While it’s hardly his fault, Gretzky thrived when goals were much more frequent. This inherently makes those goals much less valuable at the time. Let’s explore eras through the 10 players with the most career NHL goals.

While it took until Sunday for Ovechkin to formally pass Gretzky, when we put their goal count on the same scale, the difference is astounding. Ovechkin’s lead grows from a single goal to… 238 goals. The gap between Ovechkin and Gretzky is effectively Hall of Famer Henrik Sedin’s entire career goal total.

Marcel Dionne has the sixth most goals ever. In a neutral scoring environment, Ovechkin is nearly 400 goals better. For context, Leon Draisaitl has 399 goals in 11 seasons. Ovechkin is Leon Draisaitl’s career better at scoring goals than a guy with 731 of them. Era adjusted, the only player even close is Gordie Howe (71 goals back), who famously played 26 seasons.

Inflation Factor spells this out for us. A career played in a neutral era equals 100. Ovechkin’s Inflation Factor — which weighs scoring environment, schedule length, and roster size — is 90. This means his goal count is 90% of his total in a neutral era (i.e., 10% deflated). Gretzky, meanwhile, has an Inflation Factor of 118 — his goal total is 18% inflated.

🚨 #2: Unparalleled Consistency

There’s a second goal-scoring record that greatly understates Ovechkin’s true achievements: 50-goal seasons. Unless he scores eight goals in Washington‘s final five games, Ovechkin will remain tied with Gretzky and Mike Bossy with nine 50-goal seasons.

It’s the type of trivia that warrants a closer look.

The graphic shows a stunning shift. Instead of a three-way tie, Ovechkin hits the 50-goal mark 11 times. Gretzky drops from nine 50-goal seasons to five, while Bossy remarkably loses seven 50-goal seasons.

Again, this makes sense. Over Gretzky’s career, 65 different players were ’50-goal men.’ It simply wasn’t a unique feat. Thirty of those players reached the milestone at least twice. In Ovechkin’s 20 seasons? Just 21 players scored 50 — and only six did so multiple times. Tight scoring environments and three seasons abbreviated by lockout or pandemic put the 50-goal scorer on the endangered species list.

Adjusted for era, the 50-goal season leaderboard looks like this:

Ovechkin: 11
Richard: 7
Draisaitl, Jagr, Selanne, Brett Hull, Lemieux, Gretzky, Esposito, Bobby Hull, Howe, Stewart: 5

Ovechkin also has the most era adjusted 40-goal years (16) — no one else tops 10 such seasons. And he’s a perfect 20-for-20 in adjusted 30-goal seasons ahead of Howe (19) and Sidney Crosby (16).

🚨 #3. Efficiency

Players with careers cut short are often thrown into the ring with Ovechkin. If Bossy were healthy for the second half of his career… If Mario Lemieux’s prime didn’t get disrupted with injury and illness… If Pavel Bure or Cam Neely had better knees… About that.

We’ve set a very low games threshold above (600 games) to showcase Ovechkin’s per-game scoring. All figures are era adjusted. The results are mind-blowing.

There are only two names above Ovechkin, who we can see has maintained his pace for hundreds of games longer than the pack. Lemieux is the only ‘what-if’ player whose career can be crudely extrapolated and packaged into Ovechkin territory. After a three-year retirement, Lemieux scored at an adjusted 72-goal pace at age-35. So, we can at least say we saw how dominant he was as an elder statesman. But there is immense value in playing the actual games. By the time Ovechkin retires, he’ll have played somewhere between seven and eight more 82-game schedules than Mario.

Despite his exceptional pace, Matthews is only 43% to Ovechkin’s total. Having already endured more lingering injuries than Ovechkin did in 20 years, Matthews faces a long road.

To put the Bure and Bossy storylines to bed, Ovechkin has outscored both per game — over more than double their career lengths. These are two of the best snipers ever. But pretending they’d have lasted nearly 1,000 more games in perfect health and improved their scoring rate is like planning on winning the lottery. Which leads us to…

🚨 #4. Incomprehensible Second Decade

Career records aren’t earned by cramming for the exam. You can’t go berserk for a stretch and set an all-time milestone. We can now fully appreciate that Ovechkin battled the extreme disadvantage of his low-scoring era. It was effectively impossible to keep up with Young Gretzky, whose first decade was the most favorable 10-year corridor for offense in NHL history.

So, how’d Ovechkin do it? His 30s defied logic — and perhaps physiology.

Ovechkin doesn’t have LeBron James’ workout habits. He’s no gym rat. The 39-year-old has a belly, or what we might charitably call “Molson muscle” in Canada. He’s not on Tom Brady’s late-career diet regiment, either. Ovechkin crushes cola on the bench and spicy Cheetos are part of his pre-game meal.

Yet, when when we contrast Ovechkin and Gretzky’s age curves, it’s a stunning visual.

First, look at those dotted trend lines.

Gretzky rode the 1980s offensive palooza — and his otherworldly gifts — to a massive lead. He had 637 goals in his first 10 seasons but only 257 in his last 10. Gretzky never finished top 10 in goals after turning 28. He scored nine measly goals in 70 games in his final season.

Ovechkin, meanwhile, has nine goals in the last three weeks. He scored 475 goals in his first 10 seasons and added 420 this last decade. That split (and his aging curve) is not human.

🚨 #5. Two Hall of Fame Careers

Japers’ Rink, the long-running Capitals’ blog, posed a fascinating question my way this week: is it possible that Ovechkin has had not one, but two Hall of Fame careers?

The Hall has not elected a post-expansion skater with fewer than 700 career games or goaltender with fewer than 400 career games (round up for Ken Dryden’s 397). To encompass Hall-worthy credentials in just 700 or so games twice in the same career requires separate dominant runs in both one’s 20s and 30s.

Most Hall of Famers debut as teens, evolve into top-tier players in their early 20s, have an elite peak of three to seven seasons, and capably play into their 30s. There are exceptions of course: Eric Lindros peaked earlier and Martin St. Louis later, for example. But your rank-and-file Hall of Famer has a traditional life cycle.

Not Ovechkin…

Seasons	GP	G	A	PTS	G/82 GP	Awards
First 10	760	475	420	895	51.3	9x All-Star, 5x Richard, 3x Hart, Ross, Calder
Last 10	727	420	304	724	47.4	4x Richard, 2x AS, Stanley Cup, Smythe
Total	1,487	895	724	1,619	49.4

Second-Half Ovechkin: an NHL-best 420 goals in the decade; four Rockets; a Conn Smythe as Cup-winning captain; a relentless physical force. That would make him a Hall of Famer. By PPS, my Hall of Fame metric, First-Half Ovechkin scores 315 and Second-Half Ovechkin scores 245. The Hall standard for modern forwards is 219, so he easily clears the bar.

In fact, his first decade alone would make him the 19th-best forward of all-time between Messier and Bobby Hull. His last 10 seasons? The 72nd-best forward ever, tied with Paul Kariya.

While I haven’t run PPS on everyone’s splits, the other post-expansion skaters with strong cases for two Hall of Fame careers: forwards Gretzky (cutoff after his age-28 season), Messier (age-28), Jagr (age-27), and Crosby (age-28); defensemen Ray Bourque (age-28) and Nicklas Lidstrom (age-31).

Cases for Yzerman, Joe Sakic, Al MacInnis, or Paul Coffey, among others, can be made but I couldn’t confidently get both ‘halves’ elected. Patrick Roy (age-28) and Martin Brodeur (age-29) have two short but sound Hall-worthy careers among goalies.

Closing Thoughts

Ovechkin’s pursuit of 895 goals has provided the NHL with a special platform to showcase its sport. The chase has continued hockey’s momentum from the 4 Nations Face-Off, capturing mainstream attention for weeks.

But today’s dive into Ovechkin’s sniping history shows the shortfalls in raw numbers. With proper context, Ovechkin obliterated Gretzky as a goal scorer five years ago. By volume, it’s Howe that he had to pass and he did so in October 2023. By efficiency, anyone comparable maintained it for a fraction of Ovechkin’s 20-year run. By consistency, he easily has records for era adjusted 50-, 40-, and 30-goal seasons.

While we should never say never, unless the NHL fundamentally changes, this record is going to take at least two decades of uninterrupted brilliance to ever be approached. Only time will tell.

Visit adjustedhockey.com; data from Hockey-Reference, NHL.com

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