The story of this NHL season can be defined by many different moments, but there is one thing that every hockey fan is paying attention to, and that is Alex Ovechkin’s chase to break Wayne Gretzky’s all time goal scoring record. “The Great One” scored 894 goals in his career, and for a very long time, no one thought that his records could ever be touched. While some of them may never fall, we are getting very close for the first one to go by the wayside.
Over at BetMGM, you can actually bet on if Ovechkin will top Gretzky’s record this season. Right now, the doubters are winning that wager, with “No” being juiced to -300 right now. You can get +225 odds if you think that Ovi can get there this season and make a run late to do so. It isn’t going to be easy, which is why the odds are what they are, but we have seen far crazier things happen in the past.
Ovechkin needs 19 goals the rest of the way to reach 895 goals for his career, which would pass Gretzky and make him the NHL’s all time leading goalscorer. That may not sound like a lot of goals for someone like Ovechkin, but there are just 30 games left in the NHL season at the time of this writing, and he’s not quite the scoring machine that he was in his prime. He still leads the Capitals with 24 goals this season in only 36 games played, as he missed a lot of time earlier this year with injury. If it wasn’t for that injury, he breaks the record with much more ease.
With 24 goals in 36 games, that means that Ovechkin is scoring 0.66 goals per game. In order to break the scoring record, he needs 19 goals in 30 games, which would equate to 0.63 goals per game. So, actually, he is still on pace to break the record at this point if he maintains the same scoring rate that he has so far this season. However, it is just barely on pace, and it can be very hard to maintain the same goal-scoring propensity over an extended period of time. This is likely why he is -300 to not break the record, in addition to more injury concerns at the age of 39.
At this point, there is no chance you are laying -300 on a wager that he still technically is on pace to hit. If anything, I think there is some value in him getting his 19 goals needed the rest of the way to break Gretzky’s record and ride off into the sunset as the greatest goalscorer ever. At +225, and with him on pace to break it, I think it is worth a sprinkle. He’s likely going to need a couple of games where he scores multiple times. Luckily for him, the Capitals actually have a pretty favorable schedule for scoring the rest of the way.
Being in the East, Washington doesn’t get to face the worst defenses in hockey like the Blackhawks, Ducks and Sharks more than a couple times a season. However, Washington still has to face all three of those teams in their remaining schedule. I’d wager that the team is going to make it a point to get Ovi the puck when he faces those awful defenses and goaltenders, and have him fire away like no one's business.
I think him breaking the record would be a great storyline for the NHL, which needs all the attention it can get, so there are plenty of worse things you can bet on.