Grant has no time for people who argue Ovi getting to the goal record is somehow cheapened

Alex Ovechkin’s latest tally in his quest for the NHL goals record was an empty-netter at the end of the Caps’ win over Philly Wednesday – and apparently, social media was abuzz about how that’s basically cheating at this point.

You know who ain’t got no time for that? Grant Paulsen.

“This has been grinding my gears – I get a lot of these on Twitter, and one particular guy, I tool the bait on when he came to me and said Ovi can’t do it legitimately, he’s gotta score empty net goals,” GP said Thursday, “as if he's the first guy in the history of the league to have empty net goals count toward his goal title. And what annoys me about this, and it's just an ignorant thing that stupid people say, so I shouldn't care because I am the king of not letting people sit at the table, but there is this feeling around mostly North American hockey fans, that Alex Ovechkin breaking this record is going to somehow cheapen it. Whether it's empty net goals or having more power play goals or whatever excuse they're going to come up with for why he was able to score more goals than Wayne Gretzky.”

GP is basically like, 895 is 895 no matter how you get there, and in all of the history of the NHL with all of the players, only eight guys have even gotten to 700 and three to 800, let alone now 855 and 894.

“If you want to talk empty net goals, Gretzky had 56 of them in his career, Ovi has 59, so that’s negligible,” Grant said. “It’s a higher percentage and maybe a few of the next 40 will be empty-netters, who knows, but it’s not like 70 to 11 or something ridiculous like that – and even if it was, they all count.”

Danny can’t believe people were trolling this, but yes, it’s happening – and GP wasn’t done.

“This is an actual thought that is out there that Alex Ovechkin and scoring more goals than Wayne Gretzky is going to be based on power play or empty net, or whatever, and it’s all so stupid,” Grant said. “Every single goal that Wayne Gretzky ever scored was closer to an empty net goal than a goal in today's NHL. The goalies weighed 165 pounds and wore no pads, and scoring was easier back then than it is now, and it’s not particularly close. A 50-goal season now is like a 75 or 80-goal season when Wayne Gretzky was playing. So if you want to talk about who actually had it easier and whose goals are cheaper, that's not even close; it is way harder for Alex Ovechkin to score in this era with goalies who are basically the size of sumo wrestlers by the time they're done padding up between the pipes.”

GP continued that these arguments are ‘insane’ and ‘make no sense; so they’re ‘very, very annoying to me,’ and he thinks he has his finger on the pulse of why they’re out there.

“Let's call it what it is: most of these people don't want to see him break the record because either they're a hockey fan that’s not a Capitals fan, probably in markets on the east coast,” he said, “or if you’re Canadian, you're less inclined to like the European brand of the game, you're not rooting for the Russian guy, whatever it is – you’ve got some other thing that you care about, but don't come at me and try to pretend like Ovechkin is cheapening this thing. If he gets it, he is breaking an unbreakable record at a time where scoring is harder and more complicated than it has been. So relax on that.”

Your response, Danny Rouhier?

“Yeah, there’s irrefutable data that supports this conclusion. It's harder now to score than it was then,” DR said. “The game has always been a more global game than maybe the NBA was at certain points or the NFL is now, but it's not to the degree that it is at this point – anywhere in the world anywhere that's cold enough to have ice, you got players now in the NHL, basically, right?”

So that hits the geographic argument, but Danny agrees with the rest, too.

“Edmonton was a dominant juggernaut, and this doesn't take away from Wayne Gretzky, he’s the greatest player ever and nothing Ovechkin does is going to change that,” Danny said. “If Ovi tops him in goals, he’s going sit atop that points list for some time, because he has more assists than anybody else has points – but that dude was laying with five Hall of Famers at all times. Those Edmonton teams were destroying people, but it’s a different game. It was odd man rush to odd man rush at that point.”