Usually, ‘stats geek’ Neil Greenberg’s weekly visit with BMitch & Finlay is all about the analytics of what’s going on with the Commanders, but at the start of Wednesday’s chat, the guys had to pivot to the big news in DC: Alex Ovechkin is ‘week to week’ with a lower leg injury.
Hopefully, just a halt on what was a furious pursuit of history.
“He was gaining ground on Gretzky almost every day, at a very rapid pace, and was on track for 60 goals. I looked into the record a couple of days ago, and my estimates had him breaking the record around game 60 of this season,” Greenberg said. “So there is some wiggle room here if he misses a couple of games, but there's two variables, right? We don't know when he will be back, and we don't know how he will be when he comes back. A leg injury for a skating sport is very substantial, and we don't see Ovechkin hurt almost ever, so the fact that he's even in this situation is alarming.”
Alarming, but again, hopefully not the start of a ‘oh, what could’ve been’ lament for this season, and maybe beyond.
“It's tough I mean, this was a dream season, right? He wasn't limping to the record, he was sprinting, and just absolutely defying all odds, in terms of his age and everything,” Greenberg said. “We're kind of in limbo right now, and again, a leg injury is tough.”
BMitch thinks that if anyone can fight through this, it’s Ovi, who wouldn’t be even week to week if it was a serious injury – and Greenberg is cautiously optimistic.
“Hockey is normally vague on timelines and injuries. We all know what happened, but they’ll still call it a lower body injury,” Neil said. “I remember a couple of years ago Ovechkin went down in a heap early on in the season, and he needed help off the ice, and then he was back the next period.
So if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, everyone's just guessing right now as to the severity of the injury. We probably won’t know, and there’s been plenty of times the season ends and we hear people have been skating on broken legs and torn ACLs and all that other stuff. I guess the good news is Ovechkin needs less than 30 goals, so if he comes back soon, it's certainly within reach. Just got to maintain a positive outlook and hope it's sooner rather than later.”
The bigger impact to wonder about, though, is how big a blow this is to the first-place Caps.
“Obviously, you need your best players to be your best players. They have a ton of talent, so they definitely have the supporting cast and they definitely have the talent to keep things going” Greenberg said, “but you lose the best goal scorer, you're gonna take a hit. I saw in the betting markets, they're now probably like a distant fourth to be the best team in the conference, and their division hopes have certainly taken a hit. But, it all depends; if Ovechkin's back next week, this is probably a blip, but if it’s two weeks or more, I think we start to have to have some conversations as to what are the revised expectations for the team.”