For a while there, it seemed like no one would ever break Nels Stewart’s career record of 324 NHL regular season goals scored. It took Stewart 15 long years to rack up that total, starting in 1925-26 when there were only 36 games in a season. Even by the time “Old Poison” was done in 1940, they were still capped at 48 games. Who would ever play that well again for that long?
If you’re one of the thousands of dedicated puckheads surfing the NHL lines at Bodog Sportsbook, you already know the answer: Maurice Richard. It helped that the league kept expanding the regular season, all the way up to 70 games by the time Richard retired following the 1959-60 campaign. However, “The Rocket” had already broken Stewart’s record seven years earlier, well before ending his legendary career at 544 goals.
Fast-forward another six decades, and here we are with Alex Ovechkin about to knock Wayne Gretzky off his perch. Ovechkin stands at 868 career NHL goals as we go to press, just 26 behind Gretzky’s mark of 894. Will “Alexander the Great” capture one of the most treasured records in all of sports?
Looking Back at The Great One
Unless you’re very new to betting on hockey, it’s probably difficult to fathom anyone breaking any of Gretzky’s records. Nobody ever scored like “The Great One,” and nobody ever had a supporting cast quite like the one Gretzky enjoyed with the Edmonton Oilers back in the 1980s. Gretzky shattered the single-season record in 1981-82 with 92 goals, then topped 70 goals each of the next three years. He was already at 429 career goals before he turned 26.
Gretzky wasn’t just chasing 544, though. Gordie Howe snatched that record away in 1963-64, retired in 1971 with 786 goals, then played in the World Hockey Association and came back for one more year in 1979-80 after the NHL-WHA merger. Howe’s final tally: 801 career goals.
There’s always been some debate whether players should have their NHL and WHA records combined, and it picked up again when Gretzky was closing in on Howe. But officially, the magic moment came on March 23, 1994 when Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings hosted the Vancouver Canucks; Gretzky scored No. 802 on the power play, beating Kirk McLean in one of hockey’s most memorable moments.
That was also the end of Gretzky’s prime. He played seven more seasons, bouncing to the St. Louis Blues before reuniting with Mark Messier on the late-’90s New York Rangers. It’s been over 25 years now since Gretzky’s skates last touched the ice. Almost every goal-scoring record he set stands to this day.
Will Ovechkin Catch Gretzky?
Even just a few years ago, it would have seemed unlikely that anyone would catch Gretzky anytime soon. It has to happen sometime, of course. Even if the NHL appears to be sticking with 82 regular season games for the time being, as long as they keep playing hockey long enough, someone will come along and break the record.
But Ovechkin? His chances looked slim after COVID-19 forced the NHL to shorten the 2020-21 campaign to 56 games. Ovechkin played 45 of those for the Washington Capitals – the only team he’s known since joining the league in 2005 – and scored just 24 goals, leaving him at 730 goals all-time heading into his age 36 season.
Then, the unfathomable: Ovechkin scored 50 goals the next year. That’s almost twice the 26 goals Gretzky scored at the same age. Another 42 goals in 2022-23, and another 31 last year, put Ovechkin within striking distance of Gretzky’s record as the Capitals skated into 2024-25.
Even then, Ovechkin had 41 goals to go before he could claim that record, and he had just turned 39 in September. Ovechkin has said in the past that he’ll retire after his current contract with Washington ends following the 2025-26 season; as long as he stays healthy, he’ll almost certainly catch Gretzky, especially after starting this year with 15 goals in his first 18 games.
Is Alex Ovechkin Healthy?
Ay, there’s the rub. Ovechkin has managed to avoid injury through much of his storied career, but as we go to press, the Moscow native is on the shelf with a broken left fibula. Ovechkin suffered the injury on November 18 while playing the Utah Hockey Club, after colliding knee-on-knee with Jack McBain. The initial prognosis was for to six weeks before Ovechkin would play again.
This complicates matters quite a bit. Assuming the prognosis holds, Ovechkin will have missed 13 to 19 games before he returns to action. He was on quite a heater before he left, including two goals in that matchup with Utah where he got injured. Some of the NHL projections out there have Ovechkin pegged to score another 20 goals this season, which would put the Capitals captain just six shy of Gretzky with one more year on his contract.
That’s if Ovechkin enjoys a relatively normal recovery. Healing from injury is always more difficult when you’re 39 instead of 29, and while Ovechkin has been durable in the past, he did miss seven games late in 2020-21 because of a lower-body injury, and then had to skip the 2021 IIHF World Championship shortly afterwards. This broken leg may prove even harder to overcome.
But let’s say for now Ovechkin meets both his recovery timetable and his scoring projections for the rest of the year. That would make it almost a given that he’d break Gretzky’s record in 2025-26 before calling it a career. Almost; Gretzky scored just nine goals in 70 games during his final year with the Rangers, so the further away Ovechkin is from 894 at the end of this season, the more he risks missing the mark with a similar end-of-career downturn.
Who Will Catch Ovechkin?
As we said above, it has to happen sometime. Records are made to be broken, so somewhere down the road, we’ll be having this discussion again; maybe it’ll be one of today’s established stars like Auston Matthews, a relative newcomer like Seth Jarvis, or someone we haven’t even heard of yet. But it will happen.
Matthews (373 goals at press time) appears to have the best chance of any active player. Others are closer to Ovechkin, including Sidney Crosby (600), Steven Stamkos (562) and Evgeni Malkin (503), but all three of those veterans are on their last legs. Matthews made his NHL debut in 2016-17. If he can put in 10 more years at an average of 50 goals per year, with an extended graceful decline, Matthews could be the next career goal king.
If only he had been born five years later. Gretzky’s early scoring totals were inflated by the weaker opposition everyone faced post-merger. Goals were cheap again in the early ‘90s after the next round of expansion. Sure enough, the arrival of the Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken has watered things down enough to give us another crop of 60+ goal scorers:
– 69 (Auston Matthews, 2023-24)
– 64 (Connor McDavid, 2022-23)
– 61 (David Pastrnak, 2022-23)
– 60 (Auston Matthews, 2021-22)
Before Matthews hit the mark for the first time, it had been a full decade since the previous 60-goal scorer: Stamkos in 2011-12. Now everyone is scoring goals left, right and centre like it’s 1983 all over again. That’s why we’re thinking someone younger like Jarvis (91 goals in 3+ seasons) might end up having a better chance to reach whatever goal total Ovechkin lands on, provided as always that Jarvis stays healthy and continues developing as a player.
The thing is, Jarvis wasn’t scoring goals right out of the box for the Carolina Hurricanes the way Matthews did for Toronto. Maybe we need to focus on the absolute top tier of young prospects: Macklin Celebrini already has eight goals in his first 15 games with the San Jose Sharks, he’s still only 18 years old, and he’s one of the newest wave of Canadian players taking advantage of the US collegiate system, where Celebrini became the youngest ever Hobey Baker Award winner in his one year at Boston University.
We’ll wait and see in the meantime if and when Ovechkin passes Gretzky on the NHL’s all-time scoring list. Ovechkin would have some work to do before matching Gretzky’s combined WHA/NHL career mark of 940, which includes the 46 goals The Great One scored with the Oilers and the Indianapolis Racers in 1978-79 – but if you’re going down that route, Howe is still the combined record-holder with 975 goals.
While we wait for that chase to resume, make sure to check out the NHL odds page at Bodog Sportsbook for the latest matchups, each with a full list of player props attached. Stanley Cup futures are available year-round as well. Hit that refresh button for the latest odds, and enjoy hockey season.