Wayne Gretzky's Goals Record Was Unbreakable. Alex Ovechkin Broke It Anyway.

The Great One set the mark in a different era. Ovechkin outlasted the subsequent ones designed to stop him.

Oftentimes, we speak of “unbreakable” sports records with a mighty dose of hyperbole — or even simply a lack of imagination. If an athletic accomplishment can be done once, chances are it’s at least possible for somebody else to recapture the same combination of talent and circumstances necessary for it to happen again.

But sometimes changes to the game make it seem like we’ll never see those circumstances come together again.

Such was the case with the all-time NHL goal-scoring record, for which Wayne Gretzky set the bar at an impossibly high mark of 894 career goals. The idea of anyone challenging that mark — much less actually surpassing it — was, for the longest time, nothing more than the realm of fantasy. But on Sunday Alex Ovechkin made it a reality, when he notched No. 895 against the New York Islanders to claim sole possession of what is arguably hockey’s greatest record.

The Great One began assaulting what had previously been Gordie Howe’s goal-scoring record in the wide-open 1980s, with numbers that still defy belief, before finally surpassing Mr. Hockey with career goal No. 802 on March 23, 1994:

Gretzky’s historic goal was a snapshot of a very particular moment in time, not just because of the significance of the accomplishment, or even the symbolism of torch-passing between Howe and the phenom-turned-legend who had grown up idolizing him just a few hours away from Detroit in Brantford, Ontario.

Gretzky’s record also came at what felt like the last moment it could. After dominating the 1980s with the mighty Edmonton Oilers, he tearfully moved to Los Angeles — and had his very last 50-goal season in his L.A. debut at age 28. By age 30, he was done even having 40-goal seasons. The record-breaking goal to surpass Howe was the penultimate in his final 30-goal season ever, at age 33:

Some of this was the natural result of aging and changing teams, of Gretzky playing with less talent — and in a different system — than he did in Edmonton. But the simple truth is that scoring was a lot easier in the early phase of Gretzky’s career than it was later on. The goalies were now bigger and wore larger pads; they also utilized the butterfly technique to stop pucks much more efficiently than the stand-up goalies of the previous era had:

Add in dramatic improvements in skating ability for defenders and, most importantly, the widespread adoption of the neutral-zone trap defense, and the Dead Puck Era had been born just as Gretzky capped off his pursuit of Howe. While the 1993-94 season still saw a 60-goal scorer in Pavel Bure, the yearly leaders were down to barely more than 50 goals in 1996-97 and 1997-98, then dipped below 50 in 1998-99 for the first time in a full schedule since 1969-70.

At that point in hockey history, the idea of anyone seriously making a run at the Great One’s record — even among the various “Next Ones” in the sport — was completely laughable. Gretzky’s record was built on 90-goal seasons; now, we couldn’t even get 50. It felt like the conditions would never be ripe for goal-scoring history to be made again.¹

Against this trend, Alex Ovechkin was taken No. 1 overall in the 2004 NHL draft, entering a league that was still looking for young stars to fill the void Gretzky’s retirement had left a half-decade earlier. Making that task harder? An unprecedented lockout that eliminated the entire 2004-05 NHL season, forestalling Ovi’s rookie campaign and putting the future popularity of the sport at risk.

When Ovechkin finally did make his debut on October 5, 2005, he got off to a fast start, scoring a pair of goals before the second period was even over. He’d tack on 50 more by season’s end, leading all rookies (over some fella named Sidney Crosby at No. 2). Still, Ovechkin was already behind. Through their age-20 seasons, Gretzky had 106 goals, or +54 more than Ovi — a margin that the Great One would run as high as +215 in his favor (637 to 422) through age 28:

At that point, it was far from clear that Ovechkin was capable of a true assault on Gretzky’s record. In fact, a handful of other players in history have positioned themselves around where Ovi was in his mid-to-late 20s — with at least 300 goals through age 27 — and none of them came especially close to the Great One. On average, that group finished up with 559 career goals, or 335 fewer than Gretzky.

The truth was that, to take on Gretzky, a player would seemingly need to match his absurdly hot career start — or defy the laws of hockey aging. And of course, they would need scoring conditions to improve as well.

Against all precedent, then, Ovi’s scoring pace broke from the rest of the 300+ goals through age 27 group above and continued along nearly a 45-degree line as the years passed, rather than leveling off with age. And from the late 2010s into the 2020s, the Dead Puck Era, well, died. Scoring rose to its highest levels since the mid-’90s, easing the factor that had limited so many previous potential pursuits of Gretzky’s record. Ovechkin was, quite literally, the exact right player at the exact right time to come along and make history his own.

There was a particular special symbolism to Ovechkin’s record-breaking goal coming against Patrick Roy as coach of the Islanders. In a previous life, Roy had been the foremost practitioner of the butterfly; as arguably the greatest goalie ever, his success and influence helped spread the tactic across the game as much as any other factor, which in turn helped kill many of the conditions that allowed Gretzky to break Howe’s record.

But with time, scorers like Ovechkin found new ways to beat the butterfly — and the trap, and the Dead Puck Era, and everything else designed to make the pursuit of big offensive numbers impossible. By enduring, adapting and evolving through the eras, Ovechkin rewrote a record that was never even supposed to be threatened, much less broken.

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Filed under: NHL

1. Aside from records for low-scoring seasons.