Washington Capitals: Top 5 greatest disappointments of 2021

#4 Alex Ovechkin getting robbed of a 30 goal season

This isn’t a complaint on Alex Ovechkin‘s play at all. He had another good season with the Caps with 24 goals but we would’ve loved to have seen him play more. First and foremost, Ovechkin was on the COVID-19 protocol list where the team got fined $100K when the Russian four of Ovechkin, Ilya Samsonov, Dmitry Orlov, and Evgeny Kuznetsov were in a Pittsburgh hotel room playing video games and watching UFC fights without masks on.

Ovechkin missed time but got out of quarantine at the end of January. He missed time again toward the tail end of the season with a lower body injury. Add those two into the account that there was just a 56 game season instead of an 82 game campaign and the pressure was on the great eight in his chase for Wayne Gretzky’s record.

Ovechkin’s best stretch came in March where he had 10 goals in nine games including two two goal games. This was a rare season where we didn’t see an Alex Ovechkin hat trick. In fact, the lone Capital to record a hat trick this past season was T.J. Oshie.

24 goals is still a good year for the great eight but it’s a shame he didn’t finish in the 30’s. Hopefully he heats up with a full season next year.