NEW YORK — The only player in NHL history who has been teammates with Wayne Gretzky and Alex Ovechkin chuckled.
Mike Knuble loves the stat that Gretzky has more assists than any other hockey player has points.
“If he didn’t score a goal, he’d still be leading everybody in points,” Knuble said. “That’s crazy.”
Now, Ovechkin has more goals after breaking Gretzky’s record by scoring the 895th of his career Sunday, putting the “Great 8” ahead of the “Great One” in terms of putting the puck in the net. But Gretzky’s dominance through the high-scoring 1980s and into the ‘90s was more about playmaking and setting others up, while Ovechkin entered the league in 2005 during a new era of rule changes that opened the door for more offense and earned the record as a hard-shooting pure scorer who affected the sport in different ways.
“Wayne, the way he changed his game was by his thinking: just the turn-ups, the delaying, kind of evolving the game into a little bit more of a thinking man’s game and figure out how to capitalize the area behind the net, really use that to his advantage,” said Knuble, who played a combined 1,133 NHL regular-season and playoff games from 1997-2013. “Alex is just straightforward like, ‘I’m just going to go around you, I’m going through you or however to get this puck in the net.’ Two different styles.”
Reigning Stanley Cup-winning coach Paul Maurice opined, “They’re completely different styles of play: completely different players, other than what an incredible record.”
By the time Maurice started coaching in the NHL in the mid-'90s, Gretzky and Mario Lemieux were on the downside of their careers, and Ovechkin was nearly a decade from starting his.
Teams turned to clutching, grabbing, hooking and holding to slow down skilled stars such as Gretzky.
“Gretzky made the game offensively so much more dynamic,” said St. Louis Blues coach Jim Montgomery, who played a few NHL seasons against Gretzky as well as one game in Russia against Ovechkin. “That led to real more defensive-minded approach by a lot of coaches: How do we stop these delays? How do we stop Gretzky behind the net, so the game got better offensively and then it got better significantly defensively.”
From a height of 8.02 goals a game in 1981-82, when Gretzky set the single-season record with 92, the so-called dead puck era hit its nadir in 2003-04 at 5.14. The Washington Capitals won the draft lottery that spring — 21 years to the day of Ovechkin scoring No. 895 — but a lockout wiped out the entire next season, bringing with it a salary cap and better enforcement of penalties that encouraged scoring with extra room for skating and creativity and more power plays.
“The game opened for most things, and I think that created the opportunity for a great player to come in and challenge the record,” said Maurice, who has coached the second-most games in NHL history behind the legendary Scotty Bowman. “If the game doesn’t change, you wouldn’t have seen somebody challenge Wayne Gretzky’s record.”
Ovechkin has scored a record 325 power-play goals. Gretzky has the most at even strength with 617 and 73 short-handed.
“Ovechkin is the best goal-scorer ever,” said Hall of Famer Teemu Selanne, who’s 12th on the career goals list with 684. “I don’t think a lot of people would consider Gretzky as a goal-scorer, really. He has 894 goals. It’s unbelievable. And he still has 1,000 points more than No. 2 on the scoring list, so those are sick numbers.”
Technically 936 more than second-place Jaromir Jagr and 714 more assists than Ron Francis. Gretzky’s 2,857 points and 1,963 assists are records are far more untouchable than his goal mark ever was.
Gretzky was also so influential that he made the league rewrite part of its rulebook. His teams were too good at 4 on 4 with more ice to work with that each team taking a penalty no longer led to that, and the play remained 5 on 5.
Goaltenders also geared up more along the way, adding padding as stick technology improved and shots got harder and faster. It got more difficult to score, yet Ovechkin still did it more than anyone else.
“It’s so hard,” Gretzky said. “I don’t care what era you play in: ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, it’s hard to score goals. Good for him. Players are better today. The equipment’s better. The coaching’s better. But that’s the progression in our game.”
The game also got faster and more physical — not fighting, exactly, but bigger and stronger players dishing out bone-crushing hits. And unlike so many of his Soviet predecessors, Ovechkin was not fancy and finesse.
“You think of the great Russian players — Pavel Bure, Alexander Mogilny, Sergei Fedorov, Artemi Panarin, Kirill Kaprizov — all of these guys are beautiful skaters with great passing, and they’re the chess players that you expect from Russia,” said Steven Warshaw, a marketing executive who lived and worked in Moscow for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 1990s when they invested in a team there. “Whereas Ovechkin is more like Bamm-Bamm from the ‘Flintstones.’ He’s got his 100 mph slap shot. He’s a brutal player. He defines power forward. He is clearly a machine.”
Trying to stop Ovechkin the machine and Gretzky over his career that overlapped theirs, Mike Grier acknowledged one was a physical battle and the other more mental.
Gretzky, Lemieux and their ilk were always thinking two steps ahead, while Ovechkin was two steps from laying out a big hit or sniping a shot into the top corner.
“It was kind of a different job when you checked them versus someone like Ovechkin,” said Grier, now general manager of the San Jose Sharks. “Ovi, you have an idea where he’s going to be and he’ll engage in the physical game with you a little bit. I think that sometimes gets him going. But that was the challenge: He could physically take over games and be hard on you and your defensemen, but I think Wayne and those guys, they were just so smart that you think you had a lane covered or something and they’d find the next option.”
Rick Tocchet, who played against and coached with Gretzky and has been on the other bench facing Ovechkin during several playoff series over the years, thinks physicality is a big reason why Ovechkin broke the record.
“People are like, yeah, he’s a great goal-scorer, but this guy’s made some big hits in his career that’s loosened up those goals,” said Tocchet, now coach of the Vancouver Caucks. “That’s why he gets those goals because the next thing you know, the (defensemen) are not going as hard and they lose him and he gets those slot shots and he scores on a million shots around the net, too, because he’s not afraid to go in front of the net.”
But is it harder to score goals during Ovechkin’s time than Gretzky’s?
Tocchet isn’t sure. Knuble is well aware that changes in equipment, goalies and more make it difficult, if not impossible to compare the two, and he and others around the sport prefer to appreciate the varying degrees of greatness.
“It’s a little different era,” Selanne said, “but getting close to 900 goals like Ovechkin right now, it’s remarkable.”
