After a legendary NHL career spanning more than two decades, Alex Ovechkin is finally calling it a career. The Washington Capitals captain recently announced that the 2026-27 season will be his final one in the NHL.
The announcement came exactly 21 years after he made his NHL debut, and at 41 years old, there’s not much left for the Great 8 to accomplish on the ice. With 929 regular-season goals, Ovechkin will retire as the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer, having passed Wayne Gretzky’s legendary mark of 894 in April 2025. Yet the Russian superstar’s résumé goes far beyond the goal record everyone knows.
With one final season left, it’s time to dig a little deeper into the numbers behind one of hockey’s most remarkable careers. In honour of the Great 8’s upcoming retirement, here are eight stats that show just how ridiculous Ovechkin has been during his time in the NHL.
425 Goals After Turning 30
Most players aren’t supposed to get better at scoring as they get older. Ovechkin apparently didn’t get the memo. He has scored 425 goals since turning 30, the most in NHL history. That’s particularly wild considering 30 is usually around the point when goal scorers start seeing their production decline.
Ovechkin didn’t just keep scoring. He kept scoring at a rate that would be considered elite for a player half his age. He even entered his 2026-27 farewell season having scored 30 goals at age 40, adding another chapter to a career that has repeatedly made the normal rules of ageing look optional.
A Career 0.60 Goals Per Game
Here’s a stat that puts Ovechkin’s scoring ability into a different perspective. Through his first 1,575 NHL games, Ovechkin has 929 goals, giving him a career rate of exactly 0.60 goals per game. That number is tied with Wayne Gretzky for the highest career goals-per-game rate among players with at least 1,000 NHL games.
Think about that for a second. Ovechkin didn’t simply stick around long enough to pile up goals. He scored them at an extraordinary rate for more than two decades. That’s a huge part of what makes his record so difficult to imagine anyone breaking.
22 Seasons with Washington
Ovechkin’s longevity is impressive enough. Doing it with the same franchise makes it all the more incredible. The 2026-27 season is his 22nd with the Washington Capitals, putting him in a tiny group of players to spend 22 seasons with one NHL franchise. The group includes Sidney Crosby, Gordie Howe, Alex Delvecchio, Stan Mikita and Steve Yzerman.
And there’s another layer to this one. When Ovechkin appeared in Washington’s season debut on October 2, he surpassed Walter Johnson’s 21 seasons with baseball’s Washington Senators to become the longest-tenured athlete in Washington professional sports history.
331 Power-Play Goals
Ovechkin enters his final season with 331 power-play goals, the most in NHL history. There was a particular spot on the ice where NHL defencemen knew exactly where Ovechkin wanted to be. And yet they still couldn’t stop him.
For years, the Capitals’ power play was essentially a recurring episode: get Ovechkin the puck in his office in the left circle, let him load up that one-timer and get ready to celebrate. Everyone knew what was coming, but it rarely mattered.
The fact that Ovechkin has scored more than 300 power-play goals while spending much of his career operating from essentially the same dangerous spot says plenty about just how difficult his shot was to defend.
20 Seasons with 30+ Goals
Scoring 30 goals once is impressive. Doing it for 20 seasons is downright absurd. It’s an NHL record, and it doesn’t really matter how you slice it. Twenty seasons of 30-plus goals is an unimaginable level of consistency.
Even more impressive, Ovechkin has done it across multiple generations of NHL hockey, different teammates, different coaches and different stages of his career. His scoring wasn’t just spectacular at his peak. It kept showing up year after year after year. At this point, a 30-goal season almost feels like an Ovechkin annual subscription.
1,006 Total NHL Goals
Ovechkin has already claimed the biggest regular-season goal record. Now there’s one more Gretzky number sitting in the distance. The Great 8 enters his final season with 1,006 combined regular-season and playoff goals, including 929 in the regular season and 77 in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Only Gretzky, with 1,016, has more.
That means Ovechkin needs 11 more goals in his final season to become the NHL’s all-time leader in combined regular-season and playoff goals. This will be one of the more intriguing storylines to follow during his farewell tour this season.
141 Game-Winning Goals
Ovechkin’s 141 game-winning goals are also an NHL record, putting him ahead of countless legendary scorers and proving that he was at his best when it mattered most. He wasn’t simply padding the totals in meaningless situations. Again and again, he was the guy scoring the goal that put the game away.
And if you’re looking for a particularly Ovechkin-like statistic, consider that he also owns the NHL records for power-play goals, empty-net goals, overtime goals, game-opening goals, game-tying goals and go-ahead goals.
Basically, if a goal had a specific job description, Ovechkin probably found a way to own that category too.
9 Rocket Richard Trophies
The Rocket Richard Trophy goes to the league’s regular-season goal-scoring leader. For most players, winning this award just once would be a career highlight. Ovechkin has won the Rocket Richard Trophy on nine separate occasions, more than any player in NHL history.
That includes three consecutive seasons from 2013-14 through 2015-16, when he led the NHL in goals every year. For a player whose career has produced enough records to fill a book, perhaps that’s the most fitting one to end on.
And with one final season ahead, hockey gets one last chance to watch the Great 8 add to the numbers.