Why Alex Ovechkin is the greatest goalscorer who ever lived

There are imperfect analogs in other sports. Barry Bonds taking the home run record from Hank Aaron, in the shadow of baseball’s steroid era, was a grim, almost siege-like trial. LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to claim the NBA’s scoring record had its own misunderstandings, but in the end, Abdul-Jabbar proved that grace triumphs.

“It’s as if I won a billion dollars in a lottery and 39 years later someone won two billion dollars,” he wrote on his Substack. “How would I feel? Grateful that I won and happy that the next person also won. His winning in no way affects my winning.”

Gretzky has been likewise generous in his judgments. As far back as 2020, he talked about wanting to be the first to shake Ovechkin’s hand if he managed the feat. In 2022, he asked Caps owner Ted Leonsis if he could travel with the team when Ovechkin got close, and in 2025, he will.

The difference is that baseball’s and basketball’s records were all-American affairs, their importance confined to the people involved. Hockey’s goal record doesn’t feel as though it’s Gretzky’s alone to concede. The mantel of greatest goalscorer has been passed between Canadians like a torch, from Joe Malone to Cy Denneny to Howie Morenz to Nels Stewart to Maurice Richard to Gordie Howe to the Great One, a chain of succession that’s been unbroken for more than a century.

Now, at an especially tender time, the nation’s dominion over Gretzky seems as tenuous as his hold on the record. The response to Canada’s 4 Nations Face-Off win, and Gretzky’s perceived ambivalence to it, was outsized because Canadians are feeling territorial about a lot of things, and hockey, as usual, is first among them.

That Gretzky — and so Canada — will lose the goals record to a Russian and an unabashed supporter of Vladimir Putin who plays in the American capital only adds, for some, to the sense of surrender. 

“I don’t think it takes anything away from Wayne and his legacy,” Carbery said. “I just think this is a celebration of the greatest goal scorer in the history of the game.”

How, then, do Canadians make it feel like one?