Alex Ovechkin is 36 years old, skating in his seventeenth NHL season, and if you’re measuring by point production, doing it as well as he ever has before. Seven games into the season and Ovechkin leads the league in goals (8), and is second in the League in points (13), and the train keeps on rolling.
Impressive as it is to still be pacing the league in offensive metrics at this point in his career, it bears noting that 36 year-old Ovechkin’s production so far stands up pretty well against, well, all the Ovechkins that came before this version. In fact, in only one season has Ovechkin put up more than 13 points through seven games, and that came in a 2009-2010 regular season on one of the most potent offenses in modern NHL history, when Ovechkin finished the season with 109 points in only 72 games played.
All of this is to say that Ovechkin’s current production is certainly outpacing an average Ovechkin year (which is of course not average by any stretch of the imagination compared to the field of NHL skaters), and you can take a look at what that looks like below.
Here’s a look at this year’s current points trajectory versus the path he took to his eventual point total in all previous years.
Now points are all well and good, and it’s never a bad thing to see the Great Eight goosing up the scoresheet, no matter how it’s happening, but we all know what the real story is right now, and likely will be until the end of his career: breaking Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goal scoring record. And while we’re not gonna dive into that chase right now, we can focus on Ovechkin’s goal-scoring versus his career standard, because if he’s able to maintain that standard through most of his contract, the record will be his.
Here’s a look at how his 8-goal in 7-game pace stands up to his normal trajectory.
And here it is with all his previous campaigns broken out.
Lookin’ good, old man. Keep it up.
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