His goal capital is Kommersant Newspaper No. 205 (7406) dated 11/07/2022

Alexander Ovechkin set another notable sniper record. The puck thrown by the leader of the Washington Capitals against the Arizona Coyotes, Ovechkin’s 787th in the NHL regular season, allowed him to beat the achievement in goals for one club of the great Gordie Howe. There is no doubt that pretty soon the Russian will catch up with him in the list of the best snipers of all time, taking second place in it. But there are doubts about how successful this season will be for his team that has fallen into a losing streak.

When, in the second period of Washington’s home match with Arizona, Alexander Ovechkin did what he still knows almost better than anyone else in the league at 37 – he converted the majority – various North American sports sites once again began to lay out the details his biography rich in various notable events. But the reason was too weighty.

It was Ovechkin’s 787th regular-season goal in the NHL, which he entered in 2005 and played exclusively for Washington. So, if we rank the snipers by the number of goals scored for just one club, the Russian has now become the first.

And the previous record, by the way, had been held since 1971 and belonged not just to a legend, but to a legend of the highest caliber – once considered in Canada to be almost an earthly incarnation of the hockey god Gordie Howe.

Howe had 786 goals with the Detroit Red Wings, where he played for a quarter of a century, finding himself in the NHL shortly after the end of World War II. Although in fact it could have been much more if it had not appeared in the early 1970s, an alternative project to the oldest hockey league – the World Hockey Association (WHA). She poached veteran Howe among a whole squad of NHL stars. So, while still, oddly enough, in pretty good shape, he scored goals after the flight for the Houston Eros and New England Whalers representing the WHA. And they, of course, did not go to the NHL classification.

Surprisingly, Gordie Howe still managed to return to his “native” league from the collapsed WHA, already over 50 years old. In 1979, Howe was in the ranks of the Whalers, who moved to the NHL from the alternative championship, and scored 15 more times in his uniform.

Soon the careers of two hockey symbols – Canadian and Russian – will again have to be compared. In the list of the best NHL snipers of all time, Alexander Ovechkin is known to be in third place. And on the second – the same Gordie Howe, and the distance between him and Ovechkin is now only 14 goals.

Confidence that it will not take a Russian a lot of time to cover it, adds to its effectiveness at the junction of October and November.

Alexander Ovechkin started the regular season so-so, but in the end he went back to his usual schedule. Of the last seven matches, only in two he did not hit other people’s gates. And in total, Ovechkin already has seven goals in 11 meetings. It is unlikely, of course, that he will claim the tenth prize in his career for the strongest sniper in the league this season, but he can certainly take a high position in the classification.

And after Gordie Howe, Alexander Ovechkin will already storm the indicators of the leader of the “historical” rating – Wayne Gretzky. There are still 107 goals before him, that is, a couple of seasons in a shock rhythm. Gretzky, by the way, scored his 894 goals for four clubs. Most – 626 – fell on the Edmonton Oilers, in which the Canadian spent the best part of his career, the rest – on the Los Angeles Kings, St. Louis Blues and New York Rangers.

At the same time, it can be assumed that Washington fans are at least as worried about the state of the club as a whole, at least as much as the personal success of the idol. The fact is that Washington looks bad. The loss to Arizona was his fourth in a row, and in his Metropolitan division, the team has already dropped to sixth place and is not yet drawn to one for which reaching the playoffs is a matter of course.

Alexey Dospekhov