Alex Ovechkin

This Season So Far

The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

42 goals and 33 assists in 73 games — 75 points — at 20:12 a night. Minus-16, 294 shots at 14.3 per cent, fourteen on the power play, 48 penalty minutes.

Forty-two goals at thirty-seven, in his eighteenth season, following fifty at thirty-six.

47.4 per cent of the expected goals at five-on-five across 1,083 minutes, the 28th percentile, with his ice at 53-55 against an expectation of 50.89-56.46.

And then the deployment, which is the fact that reframes everything above it. He started 73.1 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone — the 99th percentile, and the third-highest of the 525 skaters in this book’s pool: 445 attacking draws against 164 defensive ones.

So a 28th-percentile chance share came out of very nearly the softest deployment in the league. Both halves of that are true, and the second half is the one his critics never quote and his defenders never explain.

The Finesse Game

294 shots at a median of 34 feet, and 412 tracked attempts.

Inside twenty feet: 84 shots on goal and 14 goals — 16.67 per cent, below the league forward rate of 17.71. From twenty to forty: 125 shots and 19 goals, 15.20 against a league rate of 11.05. Beyond forty: 84 shots and eight goals — 9.52 per cent, against a league rate of 4.16.

Read the third band again. Eighty-four shots on goal from beyond forty feet — the third-largest long-range volume of any forward in this book, behind David Pastrnak and Nathan MacKinnon — and eight goals from them, which is more than twice the positional rate and as many as any forward in the league scored from out there.

This edition has spent nine chapters dismantling the idea that a hard shot from distance buys goals, and it has been right about the defencemen every time. Alex Ovechkin is the exception the rule needs, and he is the reason the rule was believed in the first place.

97 of his 412 attempts are slap shots — a 23.5 per cent share — and his shot is measured at 97.8 mph, the 91st percentile. That is a hard shot and it is not the hardest in this chapter; Joel Edmundson’s is measured at 101.3 and produced one goal from forty-eight long shots.

So the velocity is not the mechanism. Whatever it is that Ovechkin has been doing from the left circle for eighteen years, this project cannot see it, and the honest thing is to write that down rather than to invent a cause.

A career 12.9 per cent across 1,347 games and 6,355 shots.

The Physical Game

6-3 and 238 pounds, with 48 penalty minutes in 73 games and 797 in 1,347 career games.

A top speed of 21.5 mph, the 12th percentile, and 0.5 bursts above twenty miles an hour a game, the 24th. He covers 2.96 miles a game, the 78th.

He is slow, and he has been slow for some years now. The mileage says he does not stop moving, which at 238 pounds and thirty-seven is the more remarkable of the two numbers.

He is punishing and always has been, and the hitting has not declined the way the skating has.

He is very hard to move off the puck along the wall, which at 238 pounds is not a surprise and is a real part of why the shift ends where it does.

Eighteen seasons and 1,347 games.

The Intangibles

First overall in 2004, eighteen seasons, 1,347 games, 1,485 points, all of them here, a Stanley Cup, a Conn Smythe, and the captaincy.

822 goals, 663 assists, and 299 goals on the power play, and a plus-67.

He is thirty-eight, and seventy-two goals from the all-time record.

This book does not have a category for him. The chance share is below average, the deployment is nearly the softest in the league, the skating is in the bottom eighth of it, and he scores forty goals a year at thirty-seven from a distance nobody else scores from. Every framework in this project reads him wrong in some direction, and the goals keep going in.