Alex Ovechkin scored his first goal of the season on Sunday night, and it set a record that says more about longevity than any single number in hockey.
It came against Seattle’s Joey Daccord in the first period, assisted by Ilya Protas, and it was the 190th different goaltender Ovechkin has scored on in his NHL career. That is the most in league history, 12 clear of Jaromir Jagr’s 178.
Washington lost the game 5-3.
Think About What 190 Goalies Requires
You do not get to 190 by being great for a decade. You get there by being great long enough that entire generations of goaltenders cycle through the league while you keep showing up.
Daccord had never been scored on by Ovechkin before Sunday, which is a sentence that should be impossible given how long both have been in the NHL. That is the whole point of the record. There are always new goalies, and Ovechkin keeps finding them.
Jagr played 24 NHL seasons and reached 178. Ovechkin passed that number and kept going.
He Missed the Preseason
The other detail worth sitting with: Ovechkin missed the entire preseason with a lower-body injury and had not scored through Washington’s first four games.
“I think the last two games, we had a nice chance to score, and we did,” he said afterward, which is about as much as he has ever given a microphone.
Seattle Took It in the Third
The Kraken are 4-2-0 and have won two straight to open a five-game road trip. Daccord finished with 33 saves, 17 of them in the third period, which is where Seattle flipped the game.
Jared McCann scored the winner and now has four points during a four-game point streak. Ryan Winterton added a breakaway goal late. Frederick Gaudreau has three goals in two games. Logan Thompson made 22 saves for Washington.
Capitals coach Spencer Carbery was blunt about the cause. “We’re just making too many mistakes, a lot of mistakes with the puck, poor decisions,” he said.
Seattle’s Lane Lambert saw the other side of it. “I think there was some pretty good commitment all over the place tonight,” he said.
One Other Capital Hit a Milestone
Ryan Leonard picked up an assist for the 50th point of his NHL career, reaching 23 goals and 27 assists in 89 games. That makes him the fastest Capitals skater to 50 points since Nicklas Backstrom got there in 63 games in 2007-08.
Washington is 3-2-0 and losing games it should not be losing. The franchise record Ovechkin set on Sunday will outlive the result, and it will probably outlive most of the goalies currently in the league.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.