Alex Ovechkin put quite a dent in the quickly shrinking goal deficit between himself and Wayne Gretzky on Sunday afternoon, victimizing Gretzky’s former team and goaltender Calvin Pickard for a hat trick as he continues his inexorable climb to the top of the NHL’s goal ledger. The Great Eight scored a pair of second-period goals – part of a three-goal Washington outburst in the middle frame – and added a late empty-net tally to help the Caps overwhelm the Oilers 7-3 on Sunday at Capital One Arena.
Ovechkin now has 882 career goals, putting him just a baker’s dozen south of Gretzky’s all-time mark (894). With today’s hat trick, Ovechkin has scored 200 goals since Jan. 1, 2020, making him the first player in NHL history to score 200-plus goals in three different decades (245 in the 2000s, 437 in the 2010s, and 200 in the 2020s).
“Game by game,” answers Ovechkin, asked whether he can get 13 goals in the 25 remaining Washington games this season. “Today, I have pretty good chances to score more, but I’ll take three.”
“The goals he scored tonight were huge goals in the game,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “They were massive. Obviously, when you score three, they have a big impact on the game. But the moments when they were scored, the game was highly competitive, as fast a game as we’ve played in, given the circumstances – two teams on a back-to-back coming out of the break – but the pace was high. And so the one goal, and then to get the power-play goal right after that, you could feel it. The guys got fired up on the bench, I can tell you that.”
Sunday’s victory pushed the Caps’ home point streak to 16 games (11-0-5); they’ve not lost in regulation time at home since the Saturday prior to American Thanksgiving when they dropped a 3-2 decision to the Devils here. The current home point streak matches the second-longest in franchise history; the Caps went 16-0-1 in a span of 17 home games in 2016-17.
With Sunday’s touchdown – and conversion – against the Oilers and Saturday’s snowman in Pittsburgh, the Capitals scored 15 goals in less than 24 hours. But it wasn’t just about offense, and it wasn’t just about Ovechkin, although the Caps captain and linemates Dylan Strome and Aliaksei Protas commanded all of the game’s three stars on Sunday.
“Sometimes they’re going in,” shrugs Tom Wilson of Washington’s weekend offensive onslaught. “Tonight, I think we earned almost every one of them. We played really well, played connected, making plays, skating well. It just looked like a really good group effort for a full game out there.”
After Edmonton jumped out to an early 1-0 lead on a power-play goal from Leon Draisaitl at 1:42 of the first, the Caps rallied for a pair of late first-period goals to take a 2-1 lead at first intermission.
Wilson scored for the second time in as many days, burying a rebound of a P-L Dubois deflection at 17:15 of the first to square the score at 1-1. It was the first of five straight goals for Washington.
In the final minute of the first, Jakob Chychrun netted his third goal of the weekend, a power-play point shot that put the Caps on top to stay.
In the middle frame, the Caps took over the contest. At 8:53, Ovechkin took a feed from Strome on a 3-on-2 rush and whipped it past Calvin Pickard for a 3-1 Washington lead. About 10 minutes later, he took a tee-up from Chychrun and fired one home from his left dot office on the power play, extending the Caps’ lead to 4-1.
Washington again delivered a last-minute dagger to the visitors in the middle period; Connor McMichael notched his first 20-goal season in the NHL when he converted a tic-tac-toe passing play from the slot with 14.3 seconds remaining.
With his primary helper on McMichael’s goal, John Carlson extended his assist streak to eight straight games (eight assists), matching the longest streak of his career (a dozen assists in eight games, from Nov. 7-20, 2019). Carlson ties Hockey Hall of Famer Brad Park for the longest assist streak by a defenseman aged 35 or older; only ex-Cap Sergei Gonchar (10 games in 2012-13) and Mathieu Schneider (nine games in 2006-07) have longer streaks of that ilk.
When the Caps defeated the Oilers in Edmonton last month, Oilers captain Connor McDavid did not play; he was serving a short NHL suspension. With McDavid in the Edmonton lineup on Sunday less than 72 hours removed from scoring the tournament-winning tally at 4 Nations Face-Off, the Caps knew they’d have their hands full with the Edmonton captain, but Dubois and linemates McMichael and Wilson did yeoman’s work in neutralizing the Oilers captain and his wingers.
With 20 points (eight goals, 12 assists) in as many games since the flip of the calendar to 2025 – a stretch in which Washington has rolled up a stellar 13-1-6 record – Dubois leads the Caps in scoring over that span. But he and his linemates found the scoresheet while shutting down the game’s best player on Sunday at 5-on-5.
“I'm glad you bring that up, because it doesn't show up on the score sheet,” says Carbery. “It's the most difficult matchup you get in this league, playing against 97 and having to defend him and having to stay above him, and Dubois, I’m glad he picked up an [assist]. You do a job like that against a player like that, a lot of times it goes unnoticed and it just gets swept under the rug. But he was fantastic. And like I said, this is the most difficult matchup you get in this league, and I hard matched him at home, because I'm able to do that. And he loves it.”
McDavid picked up a secondary helper on the Draisaitl power play goal, but he was kept off the scoresheet for the remainder of the afternoon and finished the game at minus-3.
“They come at you in waves, wave after wave,” says McDavid of the Capitals. “They’ve got four lines and six [defensemen], and they just roll them. They’re an impressive group; obviously they’re having a great year. Is there a way to play against that? Push back, I don’t know. It was just not good.”
With nothing good happening for the Oilers through the first two frames at 5-on-5, Edmonton coach Kris Knoblauch jumbled his lines; McDavid took shifts with at least eight different wingers in Sunday’s game.
In the third, Edmonton shrunk the lead to 5-2 on Ryan Nugent-Hopkins’ goal at 6:35, but Strome got that one back at 10:38, notching his team-leading sixth three-point game of the season.
With just under five minutes remaining, Jeff Skinner scored to make it 6-3, and that brought the deficit to a small enough number for the Oilers to pull Pickard for an extra attacker, resulting in Ovechkin’s empty-net goal and a 7-3 final at 17:22 of the third.
Ovechkin’s 32nd career hat trick ties him with Phil Esposito for the fifth most in NHL history. Ovechkin’s second goal of the game is the 135th game-winning goal of his NHL career, tying him with Jaromir Jagr for the all-time NHL lead.
With weekend losses in Philadelphia and Washington, Edmonton’s five-game road trip is off to an inauspicious start.
“We were playing a team that wasn’t in the playoffs last year yesterday,” says Knoblauch. “Tonight, we were playing the best team in the League. They’ve got the best winning percentage, and that’s not a coincidence.
“They’re running pretty well right now, everything about their team, whether it’s special teams, the 5-on-5, their defense – everything. And we don’t play well, make some mistakes, and they capitalize on it. If we have a late backcheck or a bad turnover, that team is going to capitalize on it.”
