Washington's Bobby Orr

Last night Alexander Ovechkin secured hockey's most coveted milestone, sharing it temporarily with the Great One, cementing a remarkable legacy in our nation's capital

Back last November, when Alexander Ovechkin broke his leg in a game versus Utah, I suspended all thoughts of his pursuit of the NHL all-time goal scoring record, held by Wayne Gretzky, and simply wondered: Would he play again?

A broken leg is a serious injury for any athlete at any age, but for Ovi, at 39, it seemed especially ominous to me. In my Washington youth I was also a fervent Redskins fan, and to this day I remember all too well the broken leg that effectively ended Joe Theismann’s career, at a younger age. And in 2018 another Redskins’ QB, Alex Smith, suffered a comparably gruesome, even life threatening, leg fracture. Those two words, “broken leg,” carry an especially haunting legacy for D.C. sports fans.

But silly me. There are ordinary and even extraordinary professional athletes, and then there’s Alexander Ovechkin. The Russian Machine Which Never Seldom Breaks. I spent nearly a decade in D.C. with press credentials to cover Ovechkin and the Caps. Year after year I saw up close this unicorn of a physical specimen make even the NHL’s physically mighty look meager. And sure enough, early in 2025, having missed a mere 16 games, Ovechkin was back on the ice in his Caps’ captain sweater, doing what he does better than any other hockey player in history: score goals.

Which we can now, after last night, resolutely and irrefutably testify to. Ovechkin goals no. 40 and 41 on the season, 894 overall, scored against the Chicago Blackhawks in D.C.’s hockey arena, have vaulted Russia’s greatest athletic export up to the highest of hallowed National Hockey League ice. With his very next goal Alexander Ovechkin will stand alone among hockey’s goal scoring immortals. The Great One will become The Next Greatest One, when it comes to goal scoring.

It is the best and most impressive individual record in hockey, for goal scoring is hockey’s toughest task, and thoughtful, long-range, sober consensus is that Alexander Ovechkin has undertaken it in the very toughest, most competitive era of NHL competition. Last night in Washington’s rink Wayne Gretzky watched in a suite surrounded by hockey and our nation’s capital glitterati, and as a native Washingtonian and lifelong Caps’ fan what made me most proud about the evening was the home crowd’s reaction when no. 99 was introduced on the Jumbotron: Everyone stood and in conspicuously sustained fashion everyone thundered their respect and acclaim.

My next favorite moment from last night occurred in the immediacy of goal no. 894, with Ovechkin skating over to Gretzky’s side of rink and bowing in homage before him. 2025, thanks to fresh and inspiring and riveting international competition, has elevated hockey significantly in our sports landscape, and last night I think the sport was elevated further: Partly because of Ovechkin’s feat by itself but also by virtue of the dignity and diplomacy Gretzky brought to the moment.

Ovechkin’s two goals versus Chicago last night seemed to encapsulate the full spectrum of his career goal scoring prowess. The first, no. 893, notched on just his second shift of the game before it was 4 minutes old, represented an evolution in his offensive zone scoring posture, roofed in tight just a pace outside of Spencer Knight’s goal crease. Years removed from being the dynamic skating power winger he once was, blasting wicked wristers past netminders off the rush, Ovechin this season has scored in bunches down low, well away from his proverbial office, even on the power play, Espo-like. Goal no. 894 however was about the 500th successful launch from his office in the left faceoff circle, a fast rising howitzer one-timed off a silver platter setup.

The last line of defense on the ice all know it’s coming, quite often they’re perfectly positioned to defend it, but ultimately, quite often, they’re powerless to stop it. Ovechkin’s missiles are simply too powerful and too perfectly placed, as indefensible in his 20th year of league play as they were in his first. That’s an enormous part of Alexander Ovechkin’s legendary legacy. With puck skills he’s aged like fine wine.

He’s just a few months shy of birthday number 40. Gordie Howe is the only NHLer to score 40 goals (44 of them) at age 40. Ovechkin has one year left on his Capitals contract, and he will be 40 at the start of next season. This morning, would you want to wager that should he compete in something close to 80 games next season that he won’t break that record, too?

Had he not suffered the broken leg this season he’d have fairly easily secured another 50-goal season. He already holds the record for the number of 40-goal seasons (14). Maybe someone one day will come along, as Gretzky often suggests, and break the records that Alex now has. Hockey does this, but it takes a lot of time. But if next year in his final season, at age 40, Alexander Ovechkin scores 50, man, I don’t know about that being toppled, ever.

There is for me a not so small what-if quality to Alexander Ovechkin’s remarkable career. For instance, unlike Gretzky, Alex has lost well over 100 games to labor strife, including the entirety of what should have been his rookie reason in 2004-05, and COVID. It’s eminently reasonable to postulate that absent those schedule aberrations today he’d easily have an additional 60 or 70 goals to his ledger, meaning that for what should be his final season in 2025-26 we’d be on watch for . . . goal no. 1,000.

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Cameras weren’t a particularly common fixture on phones when I began covering Ovechkin and his team some 20 years ago. I remember taking a digital camera with me to Capitals’ training camp each September in Arlington, Virginia, and laboriously uploading individual images from it to my laptop for my files, and today I lament not having more special imagery of the Gr8 at my disposal. Still, the ones I do have I cherish. Especially now.

My all-time favorite image of him on a hard drive came from the 2007 IIHF World championships, in Moscow, before Nicklas Backstrom had even arrived in D.C. I was employed by the Caps on a small team of content generators at the tournament, the only credentialed media from North America, and the Capitals quickly confirmed that this image represents the very first one captured of what would soon become the franchise’s iconic center-left wing dynamic duo.

I consumed a great deal of media this past week in the lead up to Friday night’s big game and all the expectations for it. I encountered a little bit of revisionist history as it related to Ovechkin. Specifically, in chronicling the Crosby-Ovechkin rivalry/NHL renaissance that commenced two decades ago a few hockey historians suggested that it was Crosby more so than Ovechkin who arrived in the league as a notably heralded, once-in-a-generation, franchise-altering talent. In point of fact Ovechkin and Crosby represent a rare instance of the NHL Entry Draft producing true legends in consecutive drafts. I still have a hard copy of the now long defunct-in-print Hockey News and its 2003 NHL Entry Draft preview. It’s notable for the section’s concluding page, which features an image of a cage-helmeted 16-year-old Ovechkin, then already skating for Moscow Dynamo in the Russian Super League, and is hyperbolic in its description of his prodigy.

In fact, Ovechkin was so globally admired by salivating hockey scouts as a young teenager that at the 2003 NHL Entry Draft the Florida Panthers, in the ninth round, actually tried to draft Ovechkin a year early. It was a sneaky and sly maneuver that caught everyone off guard. Ovechkin missed eligibility for the 2003 Draft with his September 17 birthday by two days. The Panthers were willing to forfeit the pick in trying the sleight of hand.

Of the 2004 draft ESPN wrote, “The consensus prospect for the top selection is Russian forward Alexander Ovechkin, who has evoked comparisons to Pittsburgh great Mario Lemieux.”

The Caps finished the 2003-04 season third from the bottom in the NHL standings, eligible for the Entry Draft lottery. They went into the lottery with a 14 percent chance of winning, behind Pittsburgh and Chicago. But they prevailed. I remember a flurry of email from puck pals suddenly littering my inbox with the miracle news, and not quite believing it (for Caps’ fans never got such news). I met a few pals on Capitol Hill that night for a celebration with a case of Russian beer we found somewhere, and I remember telling my friends, “Ovechkin is going to deliver D.C. a Cup. He’s that good.” It took a while, but it happened. And along the way over the past 20 years Ovechkin can and should be credited with transforming D.C. into a bona fide hockey town. What Bobby Orr is to Boston, still to this day, Alexander Ovechkin is to Washington.

Tomorrow on Long Island Ovechkin will attempt to score goal no. 895, securing the NHL’s goal scoring record apart from Gretzky, and his countryman Ilya Sorokin almost certainly will man the Islanders’ net. Ovechkin has scored against 182 NHL netminders over the years, another record, but not yet against Sorokin. Wanna bet against him scoring tomorrow?