NBCSN’s coverage of the 2018-19 NHL season continues with Tuesday night’s matchup between the Washington Capitals and New Jersey Devils. Coverage begins at 6:30 p.m. ET on NBCSN. You can watch the game online and on the NBC Sports app by clicking here.
Alex Ovechkin appears to be well on his way to leading the league in goals for the eighth time in his career, an accomplishment that would be unprecedented in the history of the sport. As it stands, Bobby Hull as the only other player that has done it at least seven times, while Phil Esposito is the only other player that accomplished it more than five times. Ovechkin’s dominance over his peers is just one of the many things that makes him arguably the greatest goal-scorer to ever play in the NHL.
For as great as he has been, and for as consistently as he has done it, his 2018-19 season might be his best performance yet.
In terms of the overall numbers, it is not going to be his highest goal total, because he has virtually no chance of matching the 65 goals he scored during the 2007-08 season. But it is not the raw numbers that make this season so incredible. It is the fact that he is defying every aging curve that we know that exists for a player in the NHL.
He enters Tuesday’s game against the Devils just two goals shy of reaching the 50-mark for the eighth time in his career (which would be second most in league history, behind only Wayne Gretzky and Mike Bossy), a mark that he is almost certain to hit sooner rather than later this season.
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When he does it, he will be just the fourth player in league history to do so in their age 33 season (or later), joining a list that includes only Jaromir Jagr (54 at age 33 in 2005-06), John Bucyk (51 at age 35 in 1970-71), and Bobby Hull (50 at age 33 in 1971-72).
At his current pace, Ovechkin is on track to score 54 goals this season, which would be tied for the sixth highest total for any player over the age of 30 in NHL history. He is already just one of 13 different players to ever score 50 goals over the age of 30, and is closing in on being just the fifth player to do it twice.
Let us just assume for a minute that he is able to maintain his current pace (because there is nothing over his first 71 games of the season to suggest he will not) and reaches that 54 number. It would be the third-highest total of his career, trailing only the 65 he scored in 2007-08 and the 56 he scored one year later in 2008-09.
There are two things that, arguably, make this performance so much more impressive.
First, obviously, is the age.
He was 22 and 23 years old in 2008 and 2009 and at his peak level of performance as an NHL player. At that point it was expected that he was going to dominate the league from a goal-scoring perspective. Today, he is closing in on his mid-30s, a time in his career where he should be starting to slow down just like every player that came before him did. The great ones like Gretzky, Lemieux, Richard, Esposito, and so on never maintained this type of goal-scoring pace at this age. They all slowed down dramatically by the time they were hitting their mid-30s.
The second is that he is going to end up playing close to 250 fewer minutes this season than he did a decade ago.
He was a 23-minute per night player during the 2007-08 and 2008-09 seasons when he had his two highest goal-scoring performances. This season he is *only* playing just a little more than 20 minutes per game. It may not seem like a big deal, but at his current scoring pace an extra 250 minutes could add up to as many as an additional eight goals for the season. An additional eight goals at his current pace would put him on pace for 62 goals.
Again, he is 33 years old.
Now, nobody should reasonably expect him to log that many minutes at this age, and it would probably be lunacy for someone even as freakish as Ovechkin is to try it. Having your minutes limited because you are older is just one of the many reasons players see their production decline. But the overall point here is to simply put his performance this season into perspective, because it is amazing.
Given that he is once again leading the league in goals, for the defending Stanley Cup Champions, on a team that is once again fighting for a division title, it is kind of surprising he is not getting more play in the MVP debate. Not that he should win it, but maybe just that he should be in the discussion as a potential finalist.
He is still that great.
John Walton (play-by-play) and AJ Mleczko (‘Inside-the-Glass’ analyst) will have the call from Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. Pre-game coverage starts at 6:30 p.m. ET with NHL Live, hosted by Paul Burmeister alongside Jeremy Roenick and Anson Carter.
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Adam Gretz is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @AGretz.
