Washington leader Alexander Ovechkin scored in the third game in a row

Towards the end of the regular season, Alexander Ovechkin seemed to have gained good sniper tone. The away match against the Florida Panthers was the third straight for the outstanding Washington Capitals forward in which he managed to score a goal. True, Ovechkin’s outburst during the exciting pursuit of Wayne Gretzky, who heads the list of the best NHL snipers of all time, does not help his club at all. He lost his sixth match in a row.

Alexander Ovechkin scored his 11th goal of the season, opening the scoring in the first period of the match against Florida in his favorite way – a tight power-play shot from the left faceoff circle that went past Florida goalkeeper Sergei Bobrovsky. And of course, he immediately forced North American media resources to fill their reports with numbers and simple observations at hand.

There was a good reason. Just recently, in the midst of January, the trend was the idea that Alexander Ovechkin, apparently, was not destined to accomplish the main feat in his grandiose career. It’s about knocking Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian legend, off the top spot on the list of all-time NHL scoring leaders. The 38-year-old Ovechkin spent this season, in terms of productivity, little better than veterans without an outstanding background like him spend their seasons at his, to be sure, extreme age by hockey standards. Not too bad, but lacking shine. He experienced long series of matches without goals and, although half of the regular season was already behind him, he could not reach the most modest mark of ten goals scored by his standards.

And in the match with Florida she was left behind.

Alexander Ovechkin scored his 833rd career goal, slightly shortening the distance to Wayne Gretzky’s goal. It is now 61 goals.

But this, of course, is not what is most important. The most important thing is that Alexander Ovechkin, in the second half of winter, seems to have acquired good sniper tone. The fact is that the match against Florida was his third in a row in which he managed to hit the opponent’s goal. The first, against the Dallas Stars, took place before the break associated with the All-Star Weekend in Toronto, at the end of January, the next two (before Florida, Washington crossed paths with the Montreal Canadiens) – after it, at this week. And if it turns out that this tone will last for a long time, then there will be much less doubt about whether Ovechkin will break Gretzky’s record or not.

Another thing is that after a couple of hours the same media resources concentrated on a different topic.

The fact is that Ovechkin’s form does not help Washington in any way. On the contrary, its crisis today looks very deep.

In the match with Florida, the Washingtonians led 1:0, then 2:1, but it still resulted in a defeat for them – 2:4. And it was for a club that didn’t shine anyway, suffering more often than enjoying the game for the sixth time in a row. Moreover, in these half-dozen meetings he scored a point only once – when he dragged the match with Dallas into overtime.

And Washington’s tournament position now looks, if not sad, then terribly difficult. In its level Metropolitan division, it occupies the penultimate, seventh, line. The Philadelphia Flyers are nine points away from finishing in the top three, which guarantees the right to compete in the playoffs. This is not exactly a gigantic distance, considering that the Washingtonians have three games in reserve compared to the Philadelphians, but, whatever one may say, it is extremely respectable. And in addition to the tournament dynamics, Washington’s personnel problems add dark colors to the picture – in the form, for example, of the absence of center forward Evgeny Kuznetsov, who became a client of the player assistance program.

It is not surprising that after the loss to Florida, the club’s coach Spencer Carbery did not even try to pretend to be an optimist, confident that the difficulties were temporary and that everything would get better soon. He only acknowledged that his team would have to endure and endure in search of a way out of what looked like a crazy impasse.

Alexey Dospehov