You’d be forgiven for thinking it was too good to be true.
A night that began with the Washington Capitals continuing their 50th-year anniversary festivities with a pregame ceremony honoring some of its biggest contributors from the past decade; Batya. Holtbeast. Osh. DSP. And the man who for 17 seasons was inseparable from the Capitals’ captain, assisting him more often than anybody else, Nicklas Backstrom. With the NHL’s all-time leader in goals, Wayne Gretzky, watching from the press box. All while The Great 8 was just one multi-goal game away from sharing a spot atop the NHL’s all-time goal scoring leaderboard. If you thought that Alex Ovechkin scoring his 894th career goal on a night like this was too fitting for a Hallmark movie to be a moment that belongs to our world, nobody would’ve looked at you too crazy.
But since when does conventional wisdom apply to Alex Ovechkin?
Perhaps the most striking part of Ovechkin’s performance last night was that it wasn’t a game the Caps dominated wire-to-wire. They needed both of his goals. The Blackhawks did not look the part of a team battling to avoid last place in the league for the first several minutes of the game, getting out to an early 7-1 lead on the shot counter and testing Charlie Lindgren on multiple occasions. It was a track meet that the Caps were having a difficult time keeping pace in, until Dylan Strome worked his way into an empty space behind the net and found Ovechkin waiting at Spencer Knight’s doorstep, who would then send Capital One Arena into a frenzy with the game’s opening marker. The Blackhawks were able to tie things up later in the first, but the ice had tilted in Washington’s favor from that point.
The two teams continued to trade barbs at a blistering pace, with the Caps at one point evening up the score at 2 only to find themselves down 3-2 just 10 seconds later. After a power play goal credited to Dylan Strome that came thiiiis close to being Ovi’s second tally of the night drew things back even, Washington would shortly find themselves on the man advantage again. And that’s when the greatest goal scorer in NHL history would find himself in a very familiar spot…
894.
With the only tally that would follow being Ryan Leonard entering the NHL scoresheet with his first career goal, Ovi’s 894th would stand as his 136th game winner, moving him past Jaromir Jagr for sole ownership of the most all-time. The guy just can’t help but make history every time he lights the lamp.
On a night that began in celebration of the greatest era in Caps history, the franchise’s greatest player came through when they needed him most, delivering one of the league’s most iconic moments of this decade in the process. We’ve come to expect this from Ovechkin, but I don’t think anybody will ever quite get used to it around here.