the russian ice-hockey player alex ovechkin (alexey 'ovi' oveckin) breaks wayne gretzky's all-time-goals record with 895 goals in 1487 ice-hockey NHL games (by unbelievable coincidence exactly the same number gretzky had in his career which ended with 894 goals + all-time-points record 2,857 + all-time-assists record 1,963) => the great 8 passes the great 1 in goals => 'the GR8 chase' was succesful ... and he had 1 more goal a game or two later, so finished the season after only 64 games out of 82 with43 goals and 29 assists. will he continue next eeason as well and be the 1st player with more than 900 goals?😄
i thought this wayne gretzky NHL record will last forever ... it didnt ... long live alexey ovechkin .. btw, did you know that at time of gretzky / howe / m. lemieux / p. stastny & co. the ice-hockey NHL games often ended 8 : 6 or 7 : 4? and today in the era of ovechkin / jagr & co. rather 4 : 2 or 3 : 2? of course, we could ask some AI module to search for goals per NHL game in the 70ties, 80ties, 90ties & today in order to get more accurate numbers, couldnt we?
is there any other active player who could break ovechkins all-time-goals record? probably not ... the next in the list is sidney crosby (624 goals), who is 2 years younger than alex ovechkin, but crosby will more likely mix-up the top 5 positions in all-time-points than in goals, if you asked me ... than we still have steven stamkos (582). what abt auston matthews (400) and the current season's top scorer, the german leon draisaitl (399)? both of them have 10+ more years to go ...
wanna look-up the NHL stats for players mentioned in this blog?
- the all-time-goals ~ you will find the points, assist, game played leaders here as well. even the goalies stats are there
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- alex ovechkin ~ 0.60 goals per game
- wayne gretzky ~ 0.60 goals per game in 1487 games and 21 carrier years
- gordie howe
- jaromir jagr
- mario lemieux ~ supermario have had 0.75 goals per game, but only 915 games in his 17 carrier years due to injuries
- peter stastny
- sidney crosby
- steven stamkos
- auston matthews ~ this guy has 0.64 goals per game and had twice more than 60 goals in a season
- leon draisaitl
there are still 5-7 games to go this (regular) season => will ovechkin reach 900 goals? maybe yes even if he missed approx 15 games of the season due to ankle injury. we will know in 2 weeks😄 .. addendum april 17th, no he didnt ... just see the 1st paragraph of this blog post ...
what about goalies? here is the save percentage (SV%) the best criteria, i think. some people think more about goals against average (GAA) or winning games ... but it is more dependent whether the goalie played for a strong team or for a weak one, isnt it? the interesting thing about goalies is, they've playd much less games than skaters ... it is probably a big difference whether you stay completely alone between the bars or if there are 4 other guys playing with you ...
- all-time-SV%
- dominik hasek, the dominator from the czech republic who played most time of his career in quite weak teams (pardubice in CSSR and buffalo sabres in the NHL)
