Taking stock of the NHL at the 4 Nations break
Analysis from around the league headed down the stretch; plus, when will Alexander Ovechkin pass Gretzky on the all-time goals scored list?
We’ve come to the point in the season where the NHL is taking its mid-year break. Instead of the traditional All-Star Game, NHLers have been playing in the inaugural 4 Nations Face-Off in Montreal and Boston this week.
The action during the round robin phase of the tournament has been nothing short of electric. It’s replaced the otherwise forgettable All-Star weekend with a tourney of best-on-best hockey featuring NHL players from Canada, United States, Finland and Sweden. And despite it being a meaningless exhibition tournament the players seem to be playing at playoff levels for their countries. If you’re an American fan, especially, it is must-watch TV.
But let’s focus on the NHL season so far this year. I haven’t watched much hockey outside of the live games I’ve been to in San Jose and Chicago, so I’m using the indispensable Hockey Reference site and Neil Paine’s ratings to dig into the teams and trends to watch as the league heads into its playoff push1.
Two Canadian teams — the Winnipeg Jets and Edmonton Oilers — occupy two of the top three in Paine’s current rankings with about 25 games to go in the regular season. The Jets have been a relative surprise, but they started the year on one of the hottest tears in league history going a record 14-1 in their first 15 games. They’ve sustained that performance thanks in part to top American goaltender Connor Hellebuyck, who’s regular season success has carried over to the 4 Nations tournament.
Last year’s champion Florida Panthers are again a top-5 team as are the Dallas Stars and Carolina Hurricanes. Those teams all made recent moves in anticipation of a Cup run: the Hurricanes got Mikko Rantanen, who ranks ninth in points (26 goals, 40 assists) and Taylor Hall from the Blackhawks. Dallas meanwhile acquired forward Mikael Granlund and defenseman Cody Ceci from the San Jose Sharks.
On the other end of the spectrum the three worst teams in the league from last season are still occupying the basement, with the Sharks the only team in the NHL below the 40-point mark this year. San Jose is more than a goal per game worse than an average opponent, according to Hockey Reference. And I’ve had the pleasure of watching many of those games live this season so that tracks with the eye test.
While many of the top teams in Paine’s Elo ratings or Hockey Reference’s stats are no surprise, the Washington Capitals being one of the legitimate contenders has been eye opening to me (more on that later). They started the season as the 24th best team in the rankings, and are now up to no. 6 as of the break; they are now a near-lock to make the playoffs and have a nine percent chance to win the Stanley Cup.
When will Ovechkin pass Gretzky?
The main macro storyline of the 2024-25 NHL season is when Alexander Ovechkin will overtake Wayne Gretzky’s all-time record of 894 career goals.
A few seasons ago it was still an open question whether he could surpass Gretzky, but after a couple resurgent seasons where Ovi has looked like his younger self, passing the Great One looks to be in his reach this year, especially if Washington goes deep into the playoffs.
Ovechkin began this year’s campaign with 853 goals — 41 shy of Gretzky’s 894. He started hot early in the season, seemingly scoring almost every game from his well-worn spot above the left circle, before missing time with a fractured fibula in December. Since then he’s slowed his goal scoring pace, but is still having an impressive season on offense at 39 years old.
At his current pace of 0.67 goals per game he would reach Gretzky’s 894 tallies sometime in early April if he played in all of Washington’s remaining games. Ovechkin’s shooting percentage in 2024-25 is sitting at a career-high 18.2 percent so it’s likely that goals-per-game pace will slow down. Even so, there’s a chance he’ll reach and then pass Gretzky’s feat near the end of the regular season.
If he were to continue on his current pace, and if he plays in every game (big ifs), he will score is 894th goal on April 10 against the Carolina Hurricanes. He could then go on to beat the record scoring is 895th goal on the road against the Columbus Blue Jackets on April 12. If he were to score at this career average pace of 0.6 goals per game Ovechkin will tie the record at home in the Caps’ following game against the Blue Jackets on April 13.
If we’re more conservative and assume he scores at his career average clip of 13.0 percent of his shots on goal and takes an average of 3.62 shots per game (0.47 goals per game) — like he’s doing now — we would expect him to reach the milestone at some point late in the first round of the 2024-25 playoffs. I’ve run a variety of different scenarios of when he could actually break the mark, which can be found in this Google Sheets model if you want to plug in assumptions yourself.
Dom Luszczyszyn’s modeling at The Athletic suggests an even more modest outcome. He calculates there’s a 17 percent chance Ovechkin breaks the record during the regular season, with the most likely game being the season finale against the Penguins (against Sidney Crosby mind you). That conclusion is based on a finishing pace of 0.45 goals per game as well as other assumptions about how many goals he’ll produce given the opponents and venues he’ll be facing down the stretch.
Of course, injuries and dedicated rest days will skew when he can hit the record.
Thanks to Ovi’s resurgence, the Capitals have been among the top teams in the NHL this year — they’re the second best team in the league (+1.02 SRS2), according to Hockey Reference’s rating system, trailing only the Winnipeg Jets (+1.14). Paine has them as the sixth-best team by Elo, with a 19% chance of reaching the Stanley Cup Final.
Ovechkin has played in 1465 career games to date across 20 NHL seasons, and while he never has reached Gretzky’s goal marks for a single season, his scoring prowess has proved to be more durable later into his career. Gretzky reached his mark in 20 seasons as well, but peaked in his first few years in the league where he was regularly scoring 70+ goals per season. That single-season pace is virtually untouchable in today’s NHL, which actually makes the fact Ovechkin has the chance to beat the record in the same amount of seasons that much more impressive.
If you want to follow along ESPN has a dedicated Ovechkin goals tracker page as does The Athletic. I’ll be tuning in to as many games of his as I can…records like this are only broken once every few decades.
The Capitals’s next game is against Crosby’s Penguins this Saturday.
SRS, or Simple Ratings System, is Hockey Reference’s team rating system that takes into account goal differential and strength of schedule. The rating is denominated in goals above/below average, where zero is the average.