NHLNHLThe Great One and the Great 8 have similar scoring stats—but only on the surface
Getty Images/Ringer illustration
By Ben LindberghApril 7, 1:17 pm UTC • 9 min
Some sports record setters were expected to be the best from the start. Wayne Gretzky was; dubbed “The Great One” when he was 10 years old, Gretzky never needed another nickname. No NHL player had ever scored more goals than Gretzky at 19, or 20, or—well, at 21, Gretzky scored more goals than anyone else has scored in a single season at any age. He was on pace to become hockey’s most prolific career scorer from the second he set foot on the ice. The only question was whether he’d put pucks in nets at a fast enough clip to top previous record holder Gordie Howe’s 801 goals without rivaling Mr. Hockey’s incredible longevity. And he did, passing Howe at age 33, with several seasons to spare.
Other sports record setters sneak up on people, like Lancelot storming Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For the longest time, they’re too far away to look like a threat. They don’t even appear to be approaching. And then suddenly, they’re there.
Alex Ovechkin was a prodigy and top prospect in his own right. But for the first half of his career, he never looked like the future GOAT goal scorer because, well, Wayne Gretzky existed. Ovechkin found the net 163 times through his first three seasons and 219 through his first four, which were phenomenal totals, but not as phenomenal as Gretzky’s (or Mike Bossy’s)—and Gretzky made his NHL debut when he was a year younger, too, thanks to the season-long lockout of 2004-5 that delayed Ovi’s arrival. Ovechkin scored the fourth-most goals of any player through his first five seasons, the fifth most through his first six seasons, and the seventh most through his first seven and eight seasons. He was on track to be one of the greatest goal scorers ever, certainly. But the greatest? Nah. Why would anyone have expected him to overtake Gretzky?
No one should have, but on Sunday, he did. From just outside his habitual sniping emplacement in the left faceoff circle, Ovechkin, the Capitals’ captain, fired through traffic to beat Islanders goalie Ilya Sorokin for his 895th career goal. Sorokin never saw it, but hockey fans will be seeing it for decades to come.
On the surface, the symmetry between the all-time top two goal scorers’ totals seems too good to be true, like that fun fact about Ken Griffey Jr. and Stan Musial sharing the same small birthplace and birthday. At the top-line level, Gretzky’s and Ovechkin’s scoring prowess couldn’t be more similar. Gretzky scored his 894 goals in 1,487 regular-season games over 20 seasons. Ovechkin scored goal no. 895 in game no. 1,487 and season no. 20. Great One and Great 8, seemingly in lockstep.
Yet statistically and stylistically, the two are drastically different—as evidenced by the fact that while Gretzky retired at age 38, the 39-year-old Ovi, who broke his leg last November and missed 16 games, has the fourth-most goals in the league this season (42), and the second-most goals per game behind the Oilers’ Leon Draisaitl. (Gretzky scored 42 or more goals in a season for the final time when he was 28.) This chart, which shows Gretzky’s cumulative goal lead over Ovechkin through each age, tells the tale of the tape.
Gretzky, who scored 51 goals as a 19-year-old NHL rookie, built a sizable lead over Ovechkin before the latter got going at 20. Gretzky’s lead only lengthened in each of Ovechkin’s first nine seasons, peaking at 215 goals through both players’ age-28 seasons. When Ovechkin was 28, he won his fourth Maurice Richard Trophy, awarded to the league’s leading goal scorer, but he lost ground again—for the final time. Ovechkin then whittled away at Gretzky’s lead in each of the next 11 seasons, until it was erased and now reversed. The buzz about Ovechkin’s chances didn’t really begin to build until Ovechkin was past 30, but it became a matter of “when, not if” well before he hit 40. It’s not quite a case of slow and steady winning the race—Ovechkin’s pace has hardly been slow—but we could call it slower and steadier.
Here’s another way of looking at Ovechkin’s comeback: a graph of each player’s cumulative goal tallies through each age.
That bow shape shows Gretzky’s great start, followed by a less steep slope later in his career. It’s not so much that Ovechkin gained on Gretzky by being on the ice more often than the aging Great One; Gretzky, whose durability belied his size, played 47.9 percent of his career games in the second 10-year chunk of his career, including totals of 80 or more games in three of his last four seasons. With five games remaining in the Caps’ regular-season schedule, Ovi has played 48.8 percent of his contests in the second half of his career, a negligible edge. The primary reason Ovechkin has made up ground on Gretzky is that Ovi has simply laughed in the face of the aging curve and declined to decline, as illustrated by a graph of goals per game by age for each player.
From his unprecedented peak as a young player, Gretzky fell off sharply as a goal getter. His overall goals-per-game rate fell from .82 in his first decade to .36 thereafter, a drop of 56 percent. Ovechkin, meanwhile, has been more metronomic, going from .63 to .58, a barely perceptible dip of roughly 8 percent. In other words, late-career Gretzky’s goal scoring sank more than seven times further, relative to his early output, than Ovechkin’s has relative to his early output. Ovi’s extremely nice .69 goals-per-game average this season is the fifth highest of his career. The Energizer Ovi has gone gray, but his ability to bury the puck hasn’t gone anywhere.
Of course, he’s had some help in recent seasons from the league’s scoring environment, which has grown more offense friendly. This next graph shows the leaguewide goals-per-game averages in each year of Gretzky’s and Ovechkin’s careers.
Offense got scarcer late in Gretzky’s career, which exacerbated his individual slippage as a scorer. The opposite has happened in Ovechkin’s case: The league has gotten goal happier lately, which has helped prop up his rates. (I’m relieved that Ovi’s record-breaking goal, by design, was not an empty netter.) Not until Ovechkin’s 18th season did he enjoy a more goal-rich environment than Gretzky did at the same stage of his career.
Although Ovechkin just ducked the dead puck era, which Gretzky saw the start of, much of the first decade of Ovechkin’s career was similarly low scoring. Ovi also missed the explosive 1980s, when offenses feasted before butterfly-style goaltending, bigger goalies and goalie equipment, and the neutral zone trap, among other developments, conspired against scorers. Overall, weighted by playing time in each of Gretzky’s seasons, teams averaged 3.50 goals per game during his career. During Ovechkin’s time in the league, teams have averaged 2.86 goals per game—roughly 23 percent fewer.
We can adjust for that by normalizing each skater’s goal totals to the same scoring environment—one where teams average exactly three goals per game. For instance: In one of the lowest-offense full seasons of Ovechkin’s tenure, 2014-15, teams averaged 2.66 goals per game. Ovechkin scored 53—but to put that on the scale of a three-goals-per-game league, where scoring is about 13 percent higher, we have to increase that 53 figure by the same percentage, giving us 59.8 adjusted goals. On the flip side, teams averaged 4.01 goals per game in 1981-82, when Gretzky scored 92. To get the equivalent goal total in a three-goals-per-game league, we have to lop about a quarter off that number, which turns those 92 goals into a not-so-nice 69. Repeat that calculation for each season, and we get these adjusted trajectories:
That’s right: Adjust for era, and Gretzky’s goal total would shrink to 737, while Ovechkin’s would rise to 943. In that alternate timeline, Ovechkin would have passed Gretzky almost a decade ago, en route to an advantage of 206 goals (and counting). Hockey Reference’s adjusted goals metric, which also accounts for schedule lengths and roster sizes, gives Ovechkin credit for hypothetically lighting the lamp 999 times to Gretzky’s 758, a difference of 241. After all, Ovechkin lost more time to lockouts and COVID-19. On the adjusted goals leaderboard, Gretzky trails not only Ovechkin but also Howe and Jaromír Jágr. (Gretzky’s best single-season adjusted goals campaign, 1983-84, ranks sixth of all time, four spots behind Ovechkin’s 2007-8.)
We could keep “adjusting” until we are even further removed from reality. What if Gretzky’s World Hockey Association stats counted? (Tack on 46 goals; then again, Howe would add 174.) What if the two had gotten the same support from their teammates? The takeaway is, though, that when we consider context, what appears to be a photo finish actually isn’t that close. Ovechkin is the better pure scorer by a wide degree. And if you need more proof, look no further than his 273-goal lead over the next-most prolific scorer of his era, Sidney Crosby—who just broke a record of Gretzky’s himself—which blows away Gretzky’s 186-goal lead over his closest contemporary, Mike Gartner. Or, for that matter, Ovechkin’s larger leads over the average goal counts of the next five (354) or 10 (400) top scorers of his day, compared to Gretzky’s (266 and 302, respectively).
I alluded to drastic differences in style, too: Ovechkin’s and Gretzky’s contrasting paths to 894 (and beyond) only hint at how dissimilar they are in other respects. Ovechkin has played for one team; Gretzky played for four. Ovechkin shoots righty; Gretzky shot lefty. According to the two players’ listed heights and weights, Ovechkin has 3 inches and upward of 50 pounds on Gretzky; hence, he’s often hailed as a powerful player with an unstoppable one-timer, whereas Gretzky is better known for his finesse, creativity, and preternatural puck anticipation. Relatedly, the two legends’ goal distributions are different, in terms of game situations and physical locations: Gretzky’s “office” was behind his opponents’ nets, whereas Ovechkin’s is the left faceoff circle, the spot where he let no. 894 fly.
Oh, and then there’s their politics: Ovechkin, who’s from Moscow, has long supported Vladimir Putin (who sent his congrats) and declined to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Gretzky, who has Ukrainian heritage, was quick to condemn it. Granted, Gretzky has gotten in hot water himself for being buddy-buddy with Donald Trump—which, by the transitive property, isn’t that different from giving Putin a pass. Those blemishes make it difficult to celebrate or lament the passing of the scoring torch.
Nonetheless, a few factors made this successful chase captivating. First, Ovechkin isn’t a shadow of his former self, a compiler who’s hanging on for his own greater glory and potentially harming his team through a sad or selfish pursuit. He’s easily the leading scorer on a first-place team. (Although the Caps lost on Sunday, they still boast the best record in the NHL.) I’m a ’90s kid and a New Yorker, so my clearest memories of Gretzky are from his time with mediocre Rangers teams at the tail end of his career, when he’d already broken every record and was just adding on; he was still playing in every game and leading the league in assists, but he wasn’t that great a goal scorer by then. This isn’t that. Ovechkin’s not a nostalgia act who only sporadically summons glimmers of greatness, and he hasn’t forced us all to A Clockwork Orange our way through a Pyrrhic Pete Rose– or Craig Biggio–style slog to a milestone.
Second, the player in this spotlight wasn’t actually locking up (or auditioning for) the overall GOAT title. Maybe it’s been easier for Gretzky to be so gracious about slipping to second on the all-time goals list because no one is suggesting that Ovechkin is the superior player. Ovi may have snatched Gretzky’s single most prestigious record, but he’s hardly weakened Gretzky’s claim as The Greatest One. While Ovi is a good playmaker, his greatest strength is scoring, whereas Gretzky was even better at setting up other players than at being the finisher. The truly unbreakable records are Gretzky’s 2,857 points and 1,963 assists—the latter of which is famously more than anyone else’s combined goals and assists total. (Even in adjusted points and assists, Gretzky stands alone.) So yes, Ovi surpassed Gretzky’s goal total, but scoring was Gretzky’s secondary skill.
Third, this could be the last such chase we see for some time. LeBron James, Diana Taurasi, Tom Brady, Barry Bonds, Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Ovechkin: They’ve all put various prized records out of reach, not for forever but definitely for years. Who are the next challengers for the career records in (W)NBA points; NFL passing yards, touchdowns, and Super Bowl victories; golf and tennis majors; MLB home runs; NHL goals? It’ll take awhile for new contenders to emerge.
But then, that’s what we thought about Gretzky’s goals record before Ovechkin changed our minds. Compared to Gretzky, Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews isn’t on pace to score more than 894—but by age, if not number of seasons, he’s ahead of where Ovechkin was. Now we’ve just got to give him, or someone, time to blow our minds.
Ben is a writer, podcaster, and editor who covers culture and sports. He hosts ‘Effectively Wild’ at FanGraphs and previously wrote for FiveThirtyEight and Grantland, served as editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, and authored ‘The MVP Machine’ and ‘The Only Rule Is It Has to Work.’
