Career Forecasts for Crosby and Ovechkin

The case may be developing that Ovechkin is the NHL’s best-ever goal scorer

It has been a while since I considered the career outlooks for Crosby and Ovechkin (I last looked at this in my 2011 NHL Review).  Since they King Crosby has been seriously concussed and Alexander the Great has become, perhaps, even greater looking.

My approach to career projections is described in the link, so I won’t repeat it here.  It is based on the performance of a peer group of players who established themselves at a young age, adjusted for rates rates of scoring over time.

How do Crosby and Ovechkin compare to this group?

The table below shows that Crosby has trumped the competition.  Over his career, per game played, he has out-performed the peer group – 18% more goals, 44% more assists and 34% more points.

But the pace of Crosby’s out-performance has diminished markedly.  In the 2014-15 (“2015″) season, Crosby for the first time looked like an ‘ordinary superstar’.  He has always looked like more of a playmaker than a sniper.  His goal scoring began lagging the peer group in 2012.  In 2015 his playmaking looked like this peer group for just the first time in his career.  In addition, Crosby lost a lot of games to concussions and a lockout.

Alexander the Great is clearly more of a sniper than is Crosby.  The table below shows that Ovechkin’s career out-performance of the peer group is different – 47% more goals, 15% fewer assists and 10% more points.

Ovechkin’s goal scoring performance has been remarkably consistent.  He looked poised to slow down after 2011 and 2012, but in 2013 he found his old top gear and returned to form.  He has logged six 50 goal seasons and was robbed of a seventh by a lockout.  For this peer group, goal scoring peaked at the age of 23.  Sure enough Ovechkin peaked around that time too, but his 2015 goal scoring out-performance of the peer group was second only to his stellar 2008 season.  In recent years he has kept up the goal pace at the expense of is playmaking, which peaked around 2010.

Using their career-to-date performance and the lifetime trajectories of the peer group I have (boldly – actually in italics) forecast their two careers:

The first thing to note is that Ovechkin’s career is disadvantaged by later entry into the NHL.  Notwithstanding this, he projects out at over 700 career goals, having already netted 475.

The next thing to note is that the projections may look a bit pessimistic for Ovechkin.  The model says his 50 goal years are done.  But he has been out-scoring the model for the last few years (my 2011 forecast for was 686 career goals – and it did not see the lockout coming).  His focus on scoring pace has harmed his assist projections.  He now projects out as a rare player to collect more goals than assists.  Others with careers like that are Brett Hull (741 goals, 650 assists) and Mike Gartner (708, 627).

The air has been hissing out of Crosby’s projections ever since I started doing them.  First came a slower tempo to his game, then came the concussions and lockout.  In 2015 we got what might be a new, two-way Crosby.  Yet the near term projections for him seem quite plausible.  Since my 2011 projections, Crosby’s career forecast has bled 120 goals and 147 assists – about three full seasons of work.  So this means the record books won’t see him as a near Gretzky (at one time this looked plausible).

Both of these players are near-certain hall of famers.   Their numbers are disadvantaged by playing during one of the lowest scoring eras ever.  Just imagine what these numbers might have resembled during the free scoring 1980s.  Era-adjusted, I think the case may be developing that Ovechkin is the NHL’s best-ever goal scorer.