Alex Ovechkin vs Auston Matthews

In 2007-08, 22-year-old Alex Ovechkin scored 65 goals. That’s been the high-water mark for this era of pro hockey, and Auston Matthews is on track to positively destroy it. He’s got 49 goals in 53 games, on pace for 75.

Meanwhile, Ovechkin, now 38, would be lucky if he hits 30 goals. These are two players in very different stages of their careers, but they’ll both be remembered as once-in-a-generation goal-scorers. The title of Greatest Of All Time may one day belong to one of them, but how they’d get there is an open question.

I’ve spent a big portion of my life chronicling Alex Ovechkin’s goals. To me, there are two critical qualities to his scoring that we have to understand. The first is simple: volume. Ovechkin shoots a lot, and therefore he scores a lot.

If you were to rank every season by every forward of this era by their all-situation shot rates, Ovechkin would own eight of the top ten spots.

Rank Player Season Attempt Rate 1 Ovechkin 08-09 33.9 2 Ovechkin 09-10 31.4 3 Ovechkin 14-15 30.1 4 Ovechkin 15-16 29.1 5 Ovechkin 07-08 28.7 6 Ovechkin 13-14 28.7 7 Pastrnak 23-24 28.1 8 Ovechkin 10-11 27.5 9 Pastrnak 22-23 27.2 10 Ovechkin 12-13 26.4

(David Pastrnak: hello.)

Ovechkin is shoot-y. He keeps goalies busy. He’s got a modestly-above-average 12.8 shooting percentage, but he’s never been considered a sniper. Meanwhile, Auston Matthews is downright surgical, sporting 16.3 career shooting despite lower shot rates overall. (Matthews is shooting 21.5 percent this season.)

The graph below shows Ovechkin’s and Matthews’ individual shot-attempt rates by age. Unlike the table above, the numbers here are just for five-on-five play.

Ovechkin had a higher peak, but we’ll see in a minute that the actual goal totals don’t follow that pattern. The salient thing I want to emphasize is the flatness of Ovechkin’s line as he got into his thirties. But I’ll come back to that.

In actual goals, Matthews’ current season is legendary. There have only been fourteen 70-goal seasons in NHL history and none since Alexander Mogilny did it in 92-93 — four years before Matthews was born. Ovechkin is rooting for him. “God grant that he beat me,” Ovechkin said, via translation.

Here are the goal paces for Ovechkin and Matthews over their careers, again indexed by age. Keep in mind that for comparison these are pro-rated numbers based on full 82-game seasons, not actual goal totals.

Ovechkin never came close to Matthews’ current level. Instead he had a worrying low at this point in his career. The worst season of his twenties was 2010-11, when he scored 32 goals in 79 games at age 25, which is generally considered the peak of a goal-scorer’s career. Some people interpreted that drop-off as a sign that Ovechkin’s goal-scoring period was over, that he’d never hit 40 goals again. Instead he hit it eight more times. I’d argue that him defying those doubters will be Ovechkin’s true legacy.

Because the second critical quality of Ovechkin’s scoring is durability. There’s a four-word phrase you can use to say that. Until he was 35, Ovechkin had missed just 17 of 1,164 games to injury. He played a lot and when he played he remained productive. Take another look at that shot-rate chart above; twenty attempts per hour puts a forward around the league’s top ten, and Ovechkin has remained at or near that line up until just recently.

There’s been a lot of research into how players age. Both shot rate and shooting percentage generally decline, especially when a scorer hits his thirties. Eric Tulsky, former blogger and now assistant GM of the Carolina Hurricanes, wrote, “players retain about 90 percent of their scoring through age 29, but the drop from there is pretty sharp — they hit 80 percent at age 31, 70 percent at age 32-33, and 60 percent at age 35.” Ovechkin bucked that trend in a way that is genuinely — historically — one-of-a-kind. He scored like a 24-year-old when he was 34 years old, and that is the foundation for his chase of Wayne Gretzky’s 894 goals, and that is the case for his greatness.

This season, Auston Matthews will probably reach a height Ovechkin could never grasp, and he will earn his place in the record books for it. And if he’s still winning scoring titles in 2033, then we’ll have a real debate on our hands.

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