Alex Ovechkin Poised To Pass Gordie Howe After Hitting 800-Goal Mark

Alex Ovechkin has one more hurdle to clear before he puts Wayne Gretzky squarely in his sights.

A hat-trick performance against the Chicago Blackhawks last Tuesday got the Washington Capitals’ scoring ace to 800 career goals. Now he needs one more tally to match Gordie Howe for second place on the NHL’s all-time goal-scoring list, at 801.

Washington hosts the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday at Capital One Arena in a high-profile game that will be televised nationally in Canada and on NHL Network in the U.S. (7 p.m. ET). The Capitals will also play at home on Monday, when the Detroit Red Wings come to town.

Ovechkin’s three-goal performance on Tuesday got him to 20 this season in 31 games — a 52-goal pace over an 82-game schedule. He goes into Saturday tied for sixth in goal-scoring with Mikko Rantanen of the Colorado Avalanche. Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers currently leads the race for the Rocket Richard Trophy with 27 goals.

Scoring has been on a steady rise in the NHL since the 2015-16 season. Over the last seven-and-one-third seasons, it has jumped from an average of 2.71 goals per team per game to 3.16 so far this year — the highest rate since 1993-94.

Through his career, though, Ovechkin has been a model of stunningly consistent production. Since joining the NHL in 2005, he has won the Rocket Richard award as the league’s top goal-scorer nine times. He has had nine 50-goals seasons in his 17 years and produced an average of 0.61 goals per game over 1,306 games played.

And he doesn’t miss many games, even though he carries 238 pounds on his 6’3” frame and plays a physical game. The NHL started keeping track of hits in the same year Ovechkin came into the league. With 3,369 recorded hits, he sits fourth on their list.

Ovechkin turned 37 in September. But he remains durable, and his scoring rate so far this season is actually a little better than his career average: it’s 0.63 points per game.

Howe played 1,767 NHL games over 26 years to hit the 801-goal mark, an average of 0.453 goals per game. He scored No. 801 in his final NHL game on April 6, 1980, six days after his 52nd birthday. He also scored 174 additional goals in 419 games in the World Hockey Association between 1973 and 1979.

Once Ovechkin passes Howe, just one name will remain above his.

Wayne Gretzky holds the all-time NHL record with 894 goals in 1,487 career games. He led the league in goals just five times in his 20-year NHL career but had the two most productive single seasons on record, with 92 goals in 1981-82 and 87 in 1983-84.

Ovechkin’s biggest year came 2007-08, with 65 goals, which ties him for 23rd on the all-time single-season list.

Gretzky averaged 0.60 goals per game through his full career, but his later years pulled down his average. He retired at age 38, at the end of the 1998-99 season, but the last time he scored more than 30 goals came five seasons earlier. In 1993-94, he won his 10th and final Art Ross Trophy with 130 points, with 38 goals and 92 assists.

While Ovechkin is a pure scorer, Gretzky was really a playmaker at heart. And no matter how high the scoring rate increases in the modern NHL, Gretzky’s all-time records for assists (1,963) and points (2,857) will likely never be touched.

At 35, Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins is the current record holder among active players in both categories. He has 915 assists and 1,449 points — just four ahead of Ovechkin, who’s at 1,445. After all these years, it looks like fans will have another compelling race to follow as the Sid-vs-Ovi rivalry approaches the two-decade mark.

When Ovechkin signed a new five-year contract with a cap hit of $9.5 million per season on July 27, 2021, he sent up a Bat-Signal that he was going to try to chase down Gretzky. At that time, he had 730 goals. To pass Gretzky’s 894, he’d need to average 33 goals a year over the five-year term of the contract.

So far, he has 70 goals in 109 games since signing that deal. He’s already nearly halfway.

If he can maintain his current pace, he’d break the record in just 148 more games. If he stays healthy, that would be 16 games into the 2024-25 season, less than two years from now and with more than a year to spare on his contract.

It’s an incredible pace and the hype is well justified. But while Ovi’s chase is going to give the Capitals extra attention until the record is broken — and beyond, really, until the super sniper hangs up his skates — it does come at a cost to the team.

Washington won its only Stanley Cup in franchise history five years ago, in 2018. But the organization’s need to provide Ovechkin with an environment where he can keep on scoring has prevented it from doing a proper rebuild as its core players have gotten older. The Capitals haven’t won a playoff series in the four seasons since their championship and this season, they’re at risk of missing the postseason for the first time since 2014.

They’ll head into Saturday’s game in sixth place in the Metropolitan Division with a record of 15-13-4, one point out of the second wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference. As their season wears on, their push for the playoffs will likely be another race to watch.