Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin is the first player in NHL history to score 900 career goals.
Ovechkin scored No. 900 against the St. Louis Blues on Wednesday.
After Ovechkin made history, St. Louis Blues goaltender Jordan Binnington appeared to try and hide the puck in his game pants:
Ovechkin declined to comment on the incident after the game.
“I think it had a lot to do with their success,” Blues coach Jim Montgomery told reporters after the game. “For us, we didn’t handle the moment well enough, that’s for sure.”
Ovechkin made NHL history last April in Long Island, when he scored the 895th goal of his career against the New York Islanders to break Wayne Gretzky’s longstanding record.
While celebrating the record-breaking goal, Gretzky told Ovechkin to “get to 900.”
Ovechkin has now passed that milestone 13 games into the Capitals’ 2025-26 season.
The Washington captain had already notched goal No. 897 by the end of the 2024-25 campaign. He scored No. 898 five games into the 2025-26 season during a 5-1 win over the Minnesota Wild on Oct. 17.
His 899th goal stood as the deciding tally of the Caps’ eighth game of the season, another 5-1 win at the Columbus Blue Jackets on Oct. 24.
Selected by the Capitals at the top of the 2004 draft, Ovechkin entered the NHL in 2005 and went on to score more than 45 goals in each of his first five seasons. After scoring a career-high 65 goals in 2008, he became the first player to win the Hart, Art Ross, Rocket Richard and Ted Lindsay awards in the same season.
Ovechkin went on to lead the NHL in goalscoring nine times, including seven times during a dominant stretch from 2012 to 2020. He also led the 2018 postseason with 15 goals in 24 games to help the Capitals win their first Stanley Cup.
After recording the lowest full-season output of his career with 31 goals during the 2023-24 campaign, Ovechkin returned to rank once more as one of the NHL’s top goalscorers in 2024-25.
Despite heading into the season as one of the oldest players in the NHL and later missing a month due to a fractured fibula, Ovechkin recorded 44 goals in 65 games last season to break Gretzky’s career record and propel the Capitals to the top of the Metropolitan Division.
Although Ovechkin’s scoring pace has slowed down during the early stretch of the 2025-26 season, the Capitals will hope to see him continue extending the goalscoring record as much as possible during his age-40 campaign.
Given that Ovechkin is playing on an expiring contract, and that he said in September he hasn’t yet decided if he will retire in 2026, then pressure will be on the Capitals to make the playoffs for what could be the final postseason run of the captain’s career.
