Great Eight Hits 800 in Chicago

During a lull outside the Washington locker room before Tuesday's morning skate, Caps captain Alex Ovechkin sat alone on a cart in the hallway. I approached him and asked the question on everyone's mind ahead of Tuesday night's tilt with the Blackhawks at Chicago's United Center.

"Ocho, how many goals you gonna score tonight?" I asked.
"Three, I think," came the reply.
Tuesday night's game followed several hours later, and it turned out Ovechkin is a seer as well as scorer.
Ovechkin scored three goals in Washington's 7-3 victory over the Blackhawks, becoming just the third player in NHL history to reach that 800 career goals. With tonight's outburst in Chicago, Ovechkin reached 800 on the nose, leaving him one behind the legendary Gordie Howe (801) for second place on the League's all-time list. Wayne Gretzky (894) sits atop that ledger.

Goal No. 800 came for the Great Eight in the third period of tonight's game. Anthony Mantha got in on the forecheck and pilfered the puck from Chicago defenseman Jack Johnson behind the Hawks' net. Mantha tried a centering feed for Evgeny Kuznetsov, who was cruising toward the slot all alone. Hawks goalie Petr Mrazek poked it off Kuznetsov's blade before he could pull the trigger, but Mantha got it back and went cross-crease for Ovechkin, who had just hopped onto the ice seven seconds earlier. Ovechkin fired his third goal of the night into a yawning cage, and hats rained down onto the ice as his teammates leapt off the bench to congratulate him en masse.
Chicago fans serenaded Ovechkin with a rousing chant of "Ovi, Ovi, OVI!" and Hawks elder statesmen Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews offered their congratulations on the ice as well.
"That's great," says Ovechkin. "They chant my name, throw their hats. Even in warm-ups, I was feeling that energy right away, that the fans were watching me and the fans wanted to see those historical moments."
Ovechkin and the Caps wasted little time in getting started on Tuesday night. Six seconds after Dylan Strome won an offensive-zone draw - and just 24 seconds after the opening puck drop - Ovechkin hacked at a loose puck in front of the Hawks net and popped it past Mrazek for a 1-0 Washington lead. It's the 66th time in his NHL career that Ovechkin has opened the scoring of a road game, moving him past Brett Hull (65) for the most all time.

Less than six minutes later, the Caps went on the game's first power play, and Ovechkin struck again, notching career goal number 799 with five seconds remaining on the Washington man advantage. Again, he merely took a whack at a loose puck at the top of the paint, and he didn't even get all of it, but it hopped in over the sticks of Jack Johnson and Jake McCabe, giving the Caps a 2-0 lead at 8:14 of the first period.
At that juncture of the contest, the Caps owned a 2-0 lead and a 9-1 advantage in shots on net. But to their credit, the Hawks didn't fold up and go away. Chicago had the better of possession and territory over the remainder of the first frame, outshooting Washington 8-1 the rest of the way and cutting the Caps' lead in half with exactly a minute remaining.
Caps defenseman Matt Irwin and goaltender Charlie Lindgren got tangled up in front of the Washington net, with both tumbling to the ice just as the puck was rolling toward the slot for Hawks forward Tyler Johnson. He didn't miss the open net, making it a 2-1 game at first intermission.

Early in the second, Ovechkin cruised down the left side and fired, but it was blocked by Chicago defender Seth Jones. The puck then kicked out to Trevor van Riemsdyk, who happily bit the hand that once fed him, scoring his second goal in as many games to restore the Caps' two goal lead at 4:56, and doing so against his former employer.
With Chicago on a power play in the middle of the middle frame, Lindgren made a trio of saves only to be beaten on a rebound of the third one. Hawks captain Jonathan Toews scored that rebound tally at 11:38 of the period, cutting the Washington lead to a single goal.
Late in the period, Nicolas Aube-Kubel and Garnet Hathaway missed connecting on a 2-on- none jailbreak, but late-arriving linemate Nic Dowd scooped up the loose change and ripped it home from the slot to make it 4-2 with 2:18 remaining in the second.
Ovechkin's third goal made it 5-2 early in the third, but the Caps kept at it and Mantha completed a strong game with a beauty of a rush goal at 8:59 of the third. He took a head man feed from Nick Jensen and put a wicked wrist shot behind Mrazek from the top of the left circle, extending Washington's lead to 6-2.

With just over a minute left, Chicago's Max Domi scored on his own rebound to make it 6-3, and then Dmitry Orlov closed out the scoring on a point bomb with 35.7 seconds left.
The night was all Ovechkin's, but the Caps put a heck of a coda on a rugged stretch of hockey, winning their fifth game in a row - and fourth in succession on the road - to improve to 8-2-1 in their last 11 games.
"That's special," says Kuznetsov. "It's not every day you see a guy scoring 800, right?"
Nope, it's not. It's not every day that the guy scoring 800 calls his shot on the morning of the game, either.