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 ...
