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Alex Ovechkin is just 11 goals away from breaking Wayne Gretzky’s all-time NHL career record, and the spotlight will get brighter with every single one he nets. The Capitals star is using that reality to his advantage, as he’s opted to harness the quest as a way to raise money for cancer.
When Wayne Gretzky retired in 1999, there wasn’t a single player in the NHL who had a realistic shot at surpassing the 894 regular season goals he scored over the course of his legendary career to set a new record that was previously held by Gordie Howe.
However, that was no longer the case after Alex Ovechkin made his debut with the Capitals in 2005 and quickly emerged as one of the most electric players in the league.
In 2010, John Buccigross was one of the first notable hockey names to seriously suggest Ovi had the potential to unseat The Great One when everything was said and done, and that turned out to be a pretty solid prediction.
It was fair to wonder if Ovechkin was running out of steam after he only scored 31 goals last season, but the 39-year-old returned with a vengeance this year and has already matched that total with 21 games left on Washington’s regular season schedule.
Last weekend, the veteran scored the 884th goal of his career against the Lightning, and based on the pace he’s established over the course of the current campaign, all signs point to him leapfrogging Gretzky to take sole possession of first place by the time it wraps up.
According to ESPN, Ovechkin has decided to leverage the attention the chase has garnered to support a very admirable cause, as he’s linked up with Hockey Fights Cancer and the V Foundation to donate the dollar amount of every goal he scores for the rest of his career (e.g. $885 for his next one) to support pediatric cancer research (Monumental Sports & Entertainment, the company that owns the Capitals, has pledged to match his contributions).
Fans are also being encouraged to get in on the action, and 100% of the donations will go directly to funding cancer research.