Don't Ask Alex Ovechkin To Be Unreasonable This Season

Alex Ovechkin is on the verge of breaking a record a lot of people thought might be unbreakable. I know you have heard that a lot Washington Capitals fans, but you will just have to deal with hearing that a lot more. It's an impressive feat, to say the least. It deserves to be talked about and mentioned almost every time you bring up the name Ovechkin.

When will he break the all time goal scoring record held by Wayne Gretzky? Well, that is thee question isn't it.

Going into next season Ovechkin is 41 goals back of Gretzky. When you talk about Ovechkin, 41 goals seems like nothing. He has scored more than 41 goals in a season thirteen times. He's played in nineteen seasons. A couple of those seasons he was well on his way to scoring more than 41 goals in a year but shortened seasons cost him. Like in the lockout shortened 2013 season where he had 32 goals in 48 games. In the COVID shortened season of 2021 he had 24 goals in 45 games. You could legitimately say that Ovechkin has scored 41+ goals in fifteen of his nineteen NHL season. Absolutely insane.

Which makes the record seem very vulnerable to falling this coming season.

I've been using one word when talking about Ovechkin a lot recently. That word is "unreasonable". Why?

Would anyone be shocked if the greatest goal scorer ripped off another 40+ goal season? You probably shouldn't be. I wouldn't be. As the goal scoring record gets closer and closer you would have to think the desperation and desire to get there would go up and the effort to get it would go up. Ovechkin, who never has to be told to shoot the puck might just shoot even more when the record gets closer. That is kind of a given.

But just because something could happen doesn't mean you should expect that thing to happen. Something great could happen to all of us today or tomorrow. Maybe you enter the lottery and you win it. Well, just because you enter the lottery doesn't mean you will win it. It can happen, doesn't mean it will.

Expecting a 39-year old to score 40+ goals in an NHL season is just simply unreasonable, I don't care who we're talking about.

To compare, since we're talking about a Gretzky record falling, I was curious what kind of numbers "The Great One" put up in his 39-year-old season. Turns out, he put up zero points. He was retired. He retired in 1999, at 38-years-old. That season he scored just 9 goals. The two years before that he was able to put up 23 and 25 goals.

Now, that was a different time and a different player. Athletes are very different today. The way they train, the amount of time in the year they train, how they take care of themselves, all of that good stuff.

Also the game is different. When Gretzky was finishing up his career the NHL was in the "dead puck" era. Goals and offense was very much down in that time. While Ovechkin is finishing his career, goals seem to be very up. Fifty goals a few years ago was very hard to reach unless your name was Ovechkin. Now, we've seen several sixty goal season from guys who's name is not Ovechkin. We've also seen a guy flirt with 70 goals in a year in Auston Matthews.

But as things can change some things will always stay the same. Father time is coming for every single one of us. When it comes to athletes sometimes he catches guys a lot quicker and easier than others.

Someone else that Ovechkin has dodged over his twenty years in the NHL is lady luck. Ovechkin has remained mostly healthy during his NHL career. You can call that training if you want. You can sit here and say he is just a durable athlete and some of that would be 100% true. But don't fool yourself, it's also luck.

In a sport like hockey it's lucky any season you don't get hurt. In a sport where guys are swinging sticks around, and sometimes even at you, and are smashing you into boards and glass and are banging around a frozen piece of rubber, sometimes near one hundred miles per hour, it's lucky you don't get a bone broken just standing in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

When you get older it's harder to avoid injury. When you do get older it takes just a little longer for those injuries to heal. A small ding at 25 suddenly turns into more when you're forty.

I always go back to the late, great Kobe Bryant when I think about this. A great athlete, who was relatively healthy during his NBA career. Then towards the end of his career, his body just said, "enough, I'm done being a pro athlete!". That could easily happen to Ovechkin. Or Sidney Crosby. Maybe it will happen to Aaron Rodgers in football, or any other older pro athlete. It's happened plenty before and will happen again. Hopefully just not to Ovechkin.

Something we have to think about is how Ovechkin's season went last year. For half the season last season Ovechkin was not scoring many goals. Then the second half of the year started and he went on a tear. Can he do that again?

Again, can he? Maybe. But to expect it I think is unreasonable

There is also two ways to think about this. One, the Capitals look like they should be a better team. Ovechkin should get more help offensively and guys can get him the puck easier, which makes scoring goals easier for him. Or two, the Capials look like they should be a better team this season. Ovechkin should get more help offensively this season and he doesn't need to go on tears just to drag his team into the playoffs. He's able to sit back a little more and save his energy for the most important time of the year, the playoffs.

All of this is leading up to what should we expect from the greatest goal scorer ever? If forty plus is unreasonable then what is reasonable.

Well, natural decline is reasonable. He scored 31 goals last season, give him just a little less. I think a good season from Ovechkin would be around 25 goals. That would be a good season, and it would also set him up nicely to break the goal scoring record in 2025/26 needing around 15 goals to catch Gretzky.

At the time of writing this Ovechkin will turn 39-years-old in less than one week. I don't know if there is anyone out there who is expecting a monster season from him. We could be talking to no one here.

But to anyone who is expecting a forty goal season or maybe anything close to that I think needs to calm down a bit. Yes, it's Ovechkin. Yes, we're used to him scoring forty plus goals. But at this point of his career it's unreasonable.

If Ovechkin can have a nice, consistent 25 goal season we should all be happy. Anything more than that we should be thrilled because that means the goal scoring record will probably fall very early in the 25/26 season.

Asking a 39-year-old, I don't care who it is, to top his previous season, I just think it's unreasonable.

But this is why we love sports isn't it? To watch greatness. How great would it be if Ovechkin is chasing the record? We're late in the season, he scores goal number 42 on the year. The record is his. The Capitals qualify for the playoffs that night and a couple of months later they win the Stanley Cup.

...It could happen. That's probably unreasonable too though.