Alex Ovechkin's Shot at 70 Goals

After the first two games of the Washington Capitals' season, Alex Ovechkin is on pace to score approximately 123 goals (hurray for small sample sizes!).

On Monday, the folks at Japers' Rink pondered the possibility of Ovechkin joining the elite club of players to score 50 goals in 50 games; an extremely rare accomplishment in the annals of hockey history that hasn't been achieved since Brett Hull did it nearly 20 years ago.

From Japers:

The Great Eight is certainly off to a good start with three goals in two games. But the best fifty-game stretches of Ovechkin's career so far have seen him score 43 goals, a number he's hit an impressive nine times (with some overlaps) in his young career, most recently ending March 1 of this year. (Currently, he has 39 goals in his last fifty games, whether or not you include last season's playoffs.) So he'll need to increase his production over the best 50-game goal-scoring spans of his career by more than 16%.

While the idea of 50-in-50 seems like an extreme long shot in today's game (or any time period, for that matter), let's think about the possibility of Ovechkin lighting the lamp 70 times (also a long shot in today's game) during the 2009-10 season. What would he have to do over the Capitals' final 80 games of the season?

First, some history. The 70-goal mark has been reached just 14 times (by eight different players) in league history. It hasn't been done since Teemu Selanne and Alexander Mogilny both did it during the 1992-93 campaign, finishing in a tie for the league lead with 76 goals.

Ovechkin's current career-high is 65 (the 24th-best goal-scoring season in league history) during the 2007-08 season. Sixty goals was a huge accomplishment for two reasons: 1) prior to that season it hadn't been done since Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr for the Pittsburgh Penguins a decade earlier, and 2) only a handful of players are capable of scoring even 50 goals in today's NHL. Since the 2000-01 season, for example, there have only been 16 50-goal performances, and three of them belong to Ovechkin.

Fifty appears as if it's going to be a lock for the foreseeable future, and since he's already hit the 60 mark, the next obvious milestone to consider is 70.

The simple math for the rest of the season:

The Road to 70 Player Goals To Go Games To Play Goals Per Game Needed Alex Ovechkin 67 80 .8375

That's quite an average Ovechkin would have to maintain to hit 70. Only 78 players (many of whom did not play 82 games -- some of them may have maintained that average over, say, 50 games) in the history of the league have finished a season with such a mark, while it's been done just 26 times in the post-Original Six NHL.

It's asking a lot, but if there's a player in the league today that's capable of doing it, it's most definitely Ovechkin.