With 909 regular season goals in what is likely the last season of his NHL career, Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin is undoubtedly the best goal-scorer in NHL history. While the what-if scenarios certainly landed in his favor throughout his career, which got him to the top of the NHL’s goal-scoring leaderboard, some events kept him from scoring 1,000 goals, a number that would have put him at least 106 goals ahead of Wayne Gretzky’s now second place number, 894.
Three events in his career cost Ovi around 44 goals, including 22 during the 2012-2013 lockout, nine during the Covid-shortened 2019-2020 season (he won the Rocket Richard in both of these seasons, anyway), and 13 in the Covid-shortened 2020-2021 season (not counting the games he missed with injuries and violating Covid protocol).
