Another eye-popping benchmark fell for Alex Ovechkin on Sunday, as the Colorado Avalanche edged Washington 3-2 in overtime.
Firing home from his familiar power-play perch, Ovechkin tied things at 2-2 in the final frame and in doing so reached a combined career total of 1,000 goals — his 923 regular-season strikes plus 77 in the postseason. Across the sport's history, the only man ahead of him on that combined ledger is Wayne Gretzky, at 1,016.
His Washington teammates mobbed him against the boards, clearly thrilled by the marker. Spencer Carbery went so far as to acknowledge he'd recently spotted players steering the puck toward Ovechkin in their last few games.
According to Carbery, the coaching staff had picked up on it over the previous couple of contests — odd moments where teammates fed Ovechkin in situations that struck him as strange given the chances those players themselves had. Only afterward, Carbery noted, did it click that the passing was geared toward setting up Ovechkin's 1,000th.
The man of the hour, by contrast, reacted with notable calm. As the public-address announcer relayed the feat to the home crowd inside Washington's arena, Capital One, Ovechkin merely waved from his perch on the boards rather than taking the customary lap through center ice he usually reserves for big moments. He gave it little weight postgame too, telling reporters only that hitting any target is pleasant and that this particular goal had mattered in the game itself.
A window into why Ovechkin shrugged at the figure may come from his recent Russian-language sit-down with Fonbet's 'FONtour NHL.' Chatting with the retired soccer pro Andrey Arshavin alongside ex-NHLer Nikita Filatov, the captain seemed to brush off the combined-goals tally, hinting that there would forever be some fresh record or marker waiting to be conquered.
The exchange, taken from a transcription on sports.ru and run through Google Translate, went roughly as follows:
Ovechkin remarked that every goal counts as a record and asked whether the number stood at 900. Arshavin corrected him to 998, prompting Ovechkin to clarify that the figure was the combined total. When Arshavin asked whether he also tracked the regular-season-only count, Ovechkin confirmed he did.
Arshavin pressed further, pointing out the widely held belief that playoff goals carry more weight and are tougher to score, and wondered why the records then ignore postseason markers — noting that after two decades in the league, Ovechkin ought to grasp the reasoning. Ovechkin allowed that, fair enough, the singular objective until recently had been overtaking Gretzky's record. Arshavin acknowledged he had done exactly that.
Ovechkin replied that, having toppled Gretzky's mark, his immediate next assignment was to surpass the record that factors in postseason play. Filatov observed that the league effectively lets you keep inventing new records indefinitely. Ovechkin joked that the next demand would be to surpass the figure once exhibition games are counted too. When Arshavin asked whether friendlies and playoffs weren't separate matters, Ovechkin insisted he was merely pointing out that people invent these distinctions, since nobody around there frames the milestone as including the playoffs.
Arshavin said he was simply curious about it, and Filatov chimed in that it likely came down to league tradition — that this was how people had always thought about it, and everyone chose to carry on the same way. Ovechkin closed by noting that here the count is fixed at exactly 82 games, yet for some reason the tally is being taken from the playoffs.
For ages the league has filed regular-season and postseason numbers into separate buckets, attaching greater significance to a player's regular-season career marks. Keeping the two apart evens things out, ensuring a club's playoff longevity doesn't skew the sport's marquee records.
A four-time Cup winner in Edmonton who advanced to the championship round on six occasions, Gretzky appeared in 208 postseason contests over his 20 NHL years and netted 122 goals there — a rate of 0.59 per outing.
Ovechkin, meanwhile, has logged 161 trips to the playoffs — 47 short of Gretzky's total — while tallying 77 markers at a 0.48 clip.
That leaves Ovi 16 shy of Gretzky atop the all-time combined-goals list.