Alexander Ovechkin scored two goals against Winnipeg

One of the most interesting events in the NHL regular season earlier this year was the amazing sniper renaissance experienced by Alexander Ovechkin. Just recently, the outstanding Russian forward, who creaked into the opponent’s goal in the next match in which his Washington Capitals beat the Winnipeg Jets 3:0, extended his streak of games with goals scored to five, making his third double in a week .

After the match in which Washington dealt with at home with one of the best teams in the Western Conference, Alexander Ovechkin scored 26 goals. Formally, of course, this is an unremarkable figure for him, a great forward who once even surpassed the mark of 50 goals in the regular season on duty. In the hierarchy of the main snipers of the season, Ovechkin is in the tail of the third ten and is unlikely to rise significantly higher, given that there is little time left before the end of the regular championship. His Washington, for example, has a dozen more meetings on its calendar.

But in any case, everything that happened at the turn of winter and spring with Ovechkin, strictly speaking, looks like a miracle. It is important to know that at the end of January, before the break associated with the All-Star Weekend, that is, when approximately half of the championship was already over, he had only nine goals to his name, and the trend was reminders of the striker’s age: at 38 years old Anyone can experience a gaming crisis. But with Ovechkin, apparently, it was very sharp, hinting at something irreparable.

And suddenly the crisis gave way to a real career renaissance. When they say that the Alexander Ovechkin who takes to the ice in February and especially in March is in no way inferior to his younger self, this is not an exaggeration at all.

His schedule in these two months – 17 goals in 23 matches – corresponds to the schedule of the most successful seasons of a hockey player. If he had followed it until the New Year, he would now be somewhere close to Auston Matthews of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who leads the championship sniper classification with 58 goals.

At the same time, in the course of this renaissance, Alexander Ovechkin, it seems, even adds. At the moment, its effectiveness is generally at an exorbitant level.

The match with Winnipeg extended the series of meetings in which Ovechkin did not leave the court without hitting the opponent’s goal at least once to five.

In three of them, which fit into a period of a week, he made doubles: before the Winnipegians, “Calgary” and “Toronto” suffered from him. In other words, in these five matches, Alexander Ovechkin scored eight times.

And it is indisputable that in his statistical rise the element of chance is absolutely insignificant. In this sense, the game with Winnipeg was extremely revealing. Alexander Ovechkin honestly deserved his double with his activity and aggressiveness, his never-ending desire to find himself in a dangerous area. And his second goal looked like a small masterpiece. It was born from a beautiful combination, at the end of which Ovechkin famously processed a difficult pass and, without losing speed, cut the corner, breaking into the patch, and there, showing magical control of his stick and skates, he dribbled past Connor Hellebuyck – by the way, a contender for the award for the strongest goalkeeper of the season .

And now the trend is, of course, different conversations and different numbers. Well, let’s say, demonstrating how sharply the gap between Alexander Ovechkin and the leader in the NHL sniper race of all time, Wayne Gretzky, has shrunk. It seemed that it had just gone well beyond fifty goals, and this, whatever one may say, is a decent distance, especially for a forward whose aim was off. Now it has been reduced to 46 goals. And this, one might say, is already within sight.

In theory, next season Ovechkin should break Gretzky’s record.

And everyone is still discussing Washington’s chances. In the middle of winter, everything was heading towards the fact that he would again, like last year, miss the Stanley Cup. No, there was not a single reason to believe that he would somehow be able to squeeze into it – the team was too unprepossessing. But with Ovechkin accelerating, Washington as a whole was transformed so that after the victory over Winnipeg it entered the play-off zone. So far, however, he is holding on in it on a thin scale, having a zero margin of safety. But the club’s dynamics are remarkable: in the last six meetings there have been five wins, and the Vancouver Canucks and Carolina Hurricanes have fallen victim to the Washingtonians from the league’s frontmen, along with Winnipeg.

Alexey Dospehov