“He’s definitely a very, very, very good player,” the Washington Capitals’ director of amateur scouting, Ross Mahoney, told reporters on the night of the NHL entry draft in June 2004. He was talking about Alex Ovechkin, who the team picked first overall that night. “How good will he be?” Mahoney asked. “Time will tell.” Now, nearly 21 years later, time has had its say. On Sunday afternoon in a game against the New York Islanders, Ovechkin scored his 895th goal, passing Wayne Gretzky’s all-time NHL scoring record, a tally that had stood since 29 March 1999 and that few believed would ever be broken.
Had things been slightly different in 2004, we might have been having this conversation a year ago. The NHL season after Ovechkin’s draft – the 2004-05 campaign – never happened, replaced instead by a long dispute between the league and the players’ union. Ovechkin bided his time in Russia, where he played 37 games with Dynamo Moscow. Finally, in autumn of 2005, he stepped on to NHL ice for Washington and, as Mahoney – and everyone else – expected by that time, he proved immediately to be a very good player. Ovechkin scored two goals in his first game, the first of an eventual 52 on the season (alongside 54 assists).
