In March of 2016, Alex Ovechkin and his Washington Capitals were on a road trip through California. Before flying from Los Angeles to San Jose, they had a night off. Sergey Kocharov, the Capitals’ head of communications, had an idea to fill the time.
“Sergey and I have been friends for a long time,” said Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player in history.
The pitch: Would you have dinner with Ovechkin? At the time, the Capitals’ Moscow-born captain had 516 goals, three Hart Trophies as the NHL’s most valuable player — and no Stanley Cups.
Gretzky, who had been the coach of the Phoenix Coyotes when Kocharov worked for that franchise, agreed. The pair went with their wives to Nobu Malibu, right on the Pacific Coast Highway, seafood overlooking the ocean. By that point, more than a decade into an already legendary career, Ovechkin had a reputation for unleashing a lethal shot for which goalies had no chance. That night, he unleashed a torrent of questions for a hockey icon.
“I wanted to ask about what’s the difference right now and previous years,” Ovechkin said. “How he prepared for games. What kind of food he eats. To talk about different players, how they played. Different gear. Different sticks. All those things. For me, it was like — to have a dinner with him was an unbelievable honor.
“You just take all the information and try to realize how difficult it was back then to play, to score. Obviously, the game’s changed.”
Ovechkin helped change it. Friday night in Washington, he ripped the 893rd and 894th goals of his career, matching Gretzky’s total. Sunday on Long Island, Ovechkin will play in his 1,487th regular season game — exactly the number Gretzky played in over an NHL career that spanned from 1979 to 1999.
Gretzky will be there in person. But in a way, he has been with Ovechkin since that night they shared seafood and company and questions — so many questions — beside the Pacific Ocean.
“I have a nice relationship with Alex,” Gretzky said in a lengthy phone interview last month. “I’m always encouraging him to relax. I remember, I think he was stuck at 699 for a while.”
It was actually 698 — five games without a goal back in February 2020.
“I called him and said: ‘Just relax,’” Gretzky said. “‘You’re going to get a lot of goals. Looks like you’re pressing to me. Don’t be pressing too much.’”
Ovechkin’s relentless pursuit of Gretzky lasted two decades and reshaped what hockey people thought was possible in their sport. It has not ignited a debate about whether Ovechkin has surpassed the Great One as the Greatest.
“Obviously, he’s the greatest player to ever play,” Ovechkin said Friday, sitting at his stall in the locker room at the Capitals’ training complex in Arlington, Virginia.
He said it quietly, just after he came off the ice from a morning skate before the game in which he would tie the record. If those words were blared throughout the United States and Canada, they would cause little debate.
Put it this way: Subtract Gretzky’s 894 goals from his mind-blowing points total of 2,857, and you’re left with his 1,963 assists. No. 2 on the NHL’s career points list is Jaromir Jagr with 1,921. So if Gretzky had never scored a single goal, he would still be the league’s all-time leader in points.
“For starters, to me, Wayne’s not a goal scorer,” said Paul Coffey, the Hall of Fame defenseman who played six seasons and won three Stanley Cups with Gretzky on their transcendent Edmonton Oilers teams. “Alex Ovechkin is a goal scorer. Brett Hull is a goal scorer. Guy Lafleur was a goal scorer. Mike Bossy was a goal scorer. I mean, Wayne was so much more.”
The contrasts between the two men with 894 goals are stark. There is one notable off-the-ice link: Ovechkin has long been criticized for his support of Russian President Vladimir Putin. His Instagram account features an avatar of Ovechkin posing with Putin. Gretzky has faced scrutiny for attending an election-night party for President Donald Trump, whom he has known for years, and for being photographed in a “Make America Great Again” hat, which has upset fans in his native Canada.
On the ice, though, their styles could scarcely be more different. Gretzky was a center, the best distributor of the puck the game has ever seen. Ovechkin is a finisher, a scorer who wakes up smelling goals. Gretzky was an artist with a finely pointed brush, a slender 6-foot, 185-pound hockey savant. Ovechkin is a battering ram, scoring goals with a cudgel, every bit of 6-3 and 240 pounds. Gretzky spent his entire career deftly and smartly avoiding hits. Ovechkin arrived in the NHL hitting everything in sight and, even at 39, has scarcely slowed down.
“There’s only three guys that I saw in my career that had speed, power, finesse and hockey sense to that level,” Gretzky said. “That was Gordie Howe, and then [Mark] Messier, and then Alex. It’s a rare combination to be as physically dominant as those three guys and also have [the] soft hands and hockey sense that they have. He’s in an elite group.”
Gretzky, though, is in a group of one. A nationally known name in Canada as a teenager, Gretzky reshaped hockey by how he played and how he thought. His first coach in junior hockey, when he was 14 and playing against 16- and 17-year-olds, told him to watch Philadelphia Flyers star Bobby Clarke, a smaller center who had to play the game differently.
“I was 5-foot-6 and 127 pounds,” Gretzky said. “ … Before that, the big centermen — like Phil Esposito — stood in front of the net for deflections and screens. But you couldn’t move Phil Esposito. A guy like myself and Bobby Clarke, we’d get knocked over.”
So at 14, Gretzky started playing from behind the net, a position from which he could get out his scalpel and dissect the opposition.
“Wayne was probably the best player ever that used other people,” said Kirk Muller, a Capitals assistant coach now but a longtime Gretzky adversary during his 19-year NHL playing career. “His hockey IQ was off the charts. He had an ability to keep you on your heels because you always knew that he could find any of the other four guys on the ice at any time.”
When he reached the NHL as a 19-year-old in 1979, he transformed it. The Oilers had just transitioned from the old World Hockey Association to the NHL. Gretzky began his career by scoring 51 goals and racking up 137 points.
“People are always talking: He wasn’t the fastest, wasn’t the strongest,” said Brian MacLellan, the Capitals team president who frequently played against Gretzky’s Oilers when he came up with the Los Angeles Kings in the 1980s. “He just felt the game at a higher level than everybody else. He could read the game, could read where players are going, read what’s happening on the ice, read where the goal is going to come from. He was an intuitive player.”
With Gretzky at the helm, Edmonton became a juggernaut. The Oilers reached the Stanley Cup finals in 1983, getting swept by the dynastic New York Islanders. Then they established their own dynasty. They won the Cup in 1984, ’85, ’87 and ’88. The list of Hall of Famers on many of those teams is ridiculous — Coffey, Messier, Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson, Kevin Lowe, Grant Fuhr. They were powered by one engine.
“I see it crystal clear, the same way I saw it 40 years ago,” Coffey said. “Without him, we wouldn’t have been great, because he pushed us all to be better. Every time he stepped on the ice, he stepped on the ice to score, and he made everybody around him better.”
Gretzky’s Oilers teams defined the wide-open NHL of the 1980s. His numbers from those years would look ridiculous in a video game: 92 goals, a single-season record, and 212 points in 1981-82; 87 goals and 205 points two years later; 73 goals and 208 points the year after that; 52 goals and a record 215 points in 1985-86. In his career, Gretzky went without a point in 266 games, less than once every five games. He tallied three or more points 459 times — almost once every three times out.
“Everyone knows his records,” said Sidney Crosby, the Pittsburgh Penguins icon whose career directly overlays Ovechkin’s. “… You look at his numbers and just see what he’s accomplished, it’s just on a whole ’nother level.”
What happened in that era simply does not happen now. There have been 14 70-goal seasons in the history of the NHL. Thirteen came during Gretzky’s career, including four by Gretzky. The average goals per game per team during the first 10 seasons of Gretzky’s career — when he scored 637 of his 894 goals — ranged from 3.51 to 4.01. During the entirety of Ovechkin’s career, that number has never been higher than 3.14 and has been as low as 2.65.
“I don’t care whatever era you’re in: It’s difficult to score,” Gretzky said. “If it wasn’t, everybody would get 50 goals a year, and that just doesn’t happen, right? So every era is different, unique.”
The numbers show that it is more difficult to score during Ovechkin’s era than it was during those roaring ’80s when Gretzky’s Oilers owned the league. Ask around and the primary reason seems to be goaltending: Goalies are bigger, are more athletic and have better equipment.
But there are other reasons, too. Gretzky was a master at carrying the puck through center ice, gaining the blue line, then curling up and deciding when and how to dish it or shoot it as his teammates streamed into the offensive zone. Now, coaching dictates those teammates would be covered hard by the back-checking opposition, and the player carrying the puck would be closed in on quickly.
“There’s just not as much time,” MacLellan said.
This is the world in which Ovechkin thrives. The two goals he scored Friday night to tie Gretzky’s record were also his 40th and 41st of the season — despite the fact he missed 16 games after breaking a bone in his leg — giving him his 14th 40-goal season. No one has as many.
The only player to score more goals in a season at 39 or older was Howe, who racked up 44 as a 40-year-old. With six games left this season, maybe that’s another mark for Ovechkin to hunt down.
“He’s maintained his shot,” MacLellan said. “There’s times where you go, ‘Maybe he’s losing a little bit on the shot.’ Sometimes it’s not always your legs that leave first. Sometimes it’s your hands, and you wonder. But then he gets back out there, and you look, and it’s like, ‘Well, that’s the same as it used to be.’”
Gretzky’s last game came as a 38-year-old in a season in which he scored nine goals. Ovechkin, at 39, charges forward.
“Obviously, we have different styles, different careers,” Ovechkin said. “But we both want to score goals.”
On Friday, as he worked his way from his Florida home to Washington to join Ovechkin’s pursuit, Gretzky fired off a text to Ovechkin.
“He said, ‘Score three,’” Ovechkin said late Friday night, sitting at a table at a restaurant adjacent to Capital One Arena, where the Capitals staged a boisterous news conference in front of delirious fans.
That has been Gretzky’s role in this chase: provide support. His playing career made him an icon. At his core, he’s a hockey junkie who still watches games constantly. He calls coaches and execs around the game daily. Last month, he had Tampa Bay Lightning Coach Jon Cooper to his house.
“I’ll get a call from him saying, ‘Have you tried this or that on the power play?’” Muller said.
So Gretzky and his wife, Janet, cleared their schedule for about a month so Wayne would be free to follow the Capitals when Ovechkin got within a few goals of 894. The Gretzkys have one outstanding obligation: Their daughter Paulina is married to pro golfer Dustin Johnson, who has the Masters on his calendar this week. Every year, Wayne and Janet travel to Augusta, Georgia — not so much to follow Johnson on the course but to babysit their two grandsons, 10 and 8.
What if Ovechkin doesn’t break the mark Sunday?
“They’re going to have to get a different nanny,” Gretzky said.
For all his graciousness, though, Gretzky was born a competitor. At 64, more than a quarter-century into retirement, he remains one.
“Listen, make no mistake, and I say this as nice as I can,” said Coffey, now an assistant coach with the Oilers who still talks to Gretzky about every day. “He’ll never say it. F—, he doesn’t want Ovechkin to pass his record.
“But it’s inevitable. And Wayne — Wayne is the epitome of class.”
Part of that comes from Gretzky’s upbringing as the son of a cable repairman for Bell Telephone Canada in the southwestern Ontario town of Brantford. But some of it came from the man he passed to take over the career goals record: Howe, known in the sport as “Mr. Hockey.”
Gretzky first met Howe when he was all of 10. He was teammates with Howe’s son Murray in junior hockey. When he broke into the WHA as a teenager, he skated in an all-star game with Gordie Howe and his other sons, Mark and Marty. And when Gretzky was pursuing Howe’s record of 801 goals, Howe and his wife, Colleen, began following around the Los Angeles Kings.
“I don’t think there was any better ambassador — ever — for the game of hockey than Gordie Howe,” Gretzky said. “I learned so much from him.”
As he approached Howe’s record, Gretzky remembers talking to his father, Walter.
“It’s a different era,” Gretzky recalls telling his dad. “I feel somewhat guilty breaking Gordie Howe’s record.”
Walter Gretzky didn’t hesitate.
“He said, ‘You have as much class and dignity as Gordie Howe when a young man comes along and breaks your record,’” Gretzky said. “And I remember looking at my dad, saying, ‘Well, can I enjoy this for at least a year?’”
Since 1952, there have been just four all-time leaders in goals: Maurice “Rocket” Richard, Howe, Gretzky and now Ovechkin. So only Gretzky and his teammates can relate to what Ovechkin and his teammates are going through now.
“We were probably more anxious about it than Wayne,” said Tony Granato, a Kings forward when Gretzky pursued Howe. “Wayne was trying to be cool and pretend like it wasn’t a big deal.”
“We didn’t talk much about it in the locker room,” Gretzky said.
“He was so careful that it didn’t take away from what we wanted to do as a team,” Granato said.
Which has been Ovechkin’s role in recent weeks. His most frequent response when asked about the upcoming milestone: “We’ll see.”
“Ovi doesn’t talk about it,” Capitals defenseman John Carlson said last month. “But we talk about it pretty much every day.”
That reaches a crescendo Sunday in New York. Gretzky will be there when the Capitals face the Islanders. If it doesn’t happen then, he’ll be back in Washington on Thursday for a game against Carolina. He is hockey royalty who takes care of the next generation — even if that generation is preparing to erase a record so many people thought might stand forever.
“He texts me,” Ovechkin said. “He sometimes FaceTimes me. We have a great relationship. He’s been supportive, and he’s happy right now with what’s happening. It’s history, and it’s great for hockey.”
If it’s good for hockey, Wayne Gretzky is all for it. It’s why he went to dinner with a younger Ovechkin all those years ago. It’s why he has reached out at so many key moments since. It’s why he’ll be there until his record is broken. Because that’s what’s good for hockey, and long after his career ended, that’s what Wayne Gretzky cares most about.
