Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin finished his 19th career season in the NHL by going without a point in a playoff series for the first time. After a strong second half of the year saw him score 23 goals in 36 games, Ovechkin ended his season asking for much of the blame for the series loss to New York to be put on him.
Ovechkin, who will turn 39 before next season kicks off, has never had a season where he has not led the Capitals in goal-scoring. The Russian superstar’s consistency and durability are a thing of legend but Father Time is undefeated. Washington got a glimpse of how aging could impact Ovechkin during their four-game sweep at the hands of the New York Rangers.
“I don’t think it’s fair – he’s 38 years old,” Capitals general manager Brian MacLellan said Tuesday. “We can’t come in and say he’s got to carry us or he’s got to get 50 goals.”
After the All-Star break, Ovechkin contributed over 21 percent of the Capitals’ goals. He was also one of just six of the team’s players not to miss a game from the start of February through the end of the regular season schedule. The 79 total games were the most he has played in a single season since getting into 81 games during the 2018-19 campaign.
Head coach Spencer Carbery attributes most of Ovechkin’s late-season drought to fatigue. The Capitals could not take a single game off for months on end if they wanted to make the playoffs due to the early hole they dug themselves.
“Really challenging year, long year,” Carbery said. “Felt like we were in the playoffs for three months and the second half that [Ovechkin] had and the amount of production and how much we relied on all of our top guys coming down the stretch. From a minutes, deployment, top guy [standpoint] – John Carlson, [Ovechkin] – how many blowouts or where we’re up three goals games did we have this season? So, when you think about that, we’re playing games going down to the buzzer almost nightly.
“The physical part is one part but the other part is mentally having to stay in that game right to the buzzer ends every single night. So, you do that for three months and it takes a toll on you and Ovi isn’t 28 years old anymore. He’s a veteran player and we asked a lot of him. I put a lot on him as our captain. I just think from a mental and physical fatigue standpoint, he went through a lot this year.”
The Capitals sold at this past trade deadline, letting offensively gifted players like Anthony Mantha and Evgeny Kuznetsov move on to different teams. The goal this summer for MacLellan is to do the opposite and add present-day talent to the team’s roster via the future assets like draft picks he has acquired over the past two years.
Doing so would limit the weight on Ovechkin’s shoulders and distribute the scoring burden more evenly so the big winger doesn’t flame out at the end of another season. After Ovechkin and Dylan Strome, the next highest-scoring forward on the Capitals this year was Tom Wilson, who managed just 35 points.
“There’s a lot of pressure on [Ovechkin],” MacLellan said. “He’s expected to carry us offensively at 38 is probably not fair. But we lost a couple offensive players. We’ve got young guys coming in. So that’s just the circumstance we’re in, and we’re going to look to get some help here, too, if we can find it.”
MacLellan expects to get hot streaks and lower-scoring periods from Ovechkin at this point of the Capitals captain’s career. The goal would be to add help so the hot streaks stay longer and the droughts don’t negatively impact the team as much.
Ovechkin went on a career-worst, 14-game streak without a goal before the New Year. Later in the season, he went on the third longest point streak (10 games) for a player age 38 or older in modern NHL history. He would also have a run in March where he scored eight goals in five games.
“I think you’re going to get both,” MacLellan said. “I would expect both. I think he’s going to have times where you look like he still has it and he’s playing well and he’s moving well and he’s scoring and there’s going to be lulls in his game. The schedule’s going to grind on a 38-year-old. We’re traveling a lot, playing every second night, two in threes. It’s hard for older players to play at a high level of consistency. It’s just not set up for that physically and mentally.”
Ovechkin finished the 2023-24 season with 31 goals, becoming the first player in league history to have 18 30-goal seasons. The Great Eight is also now just 41 markers shy of sharing the NHL’s all-time goals record with Wayne Gretzky and shared rare optimism about his chase of the record during his own Breakdown Day presser.
Taking the pressure off Ovechkin to lead the team to overall success could aid him in tracking Gretzky down. Ovechkin has two years remaining on a five-year extension he signed with Washington in the summer of 2021. He has said previously that he believes he will retire at the end of that deal.
