Whicker: Alex Ovechkin remains a Capital punisher as he chases NHL goals record

LOS ANGELES — Nolan Ryan’s ambition was simple. Ride into baseball on the vapor trail of his fastball. Ride out of the game the same way.

Alex Ovechkin does that, too.

The Washington Capitals drafted him first overall in 2005 and he scored 52 goals as a rookie. Eight times Ovechkin has scored at least 50 in a season. At 36, he has 12 in the Capitals’ first 16 games. Ready, aim fire, except with him it’s more like readyaimfire. Inevitability is not hard to predict, but it’s hard to beat.

Ovechkin made his first visit to Staples Center in two years on Wednesday night, when Washington visited the Kings.

“What do I appreciate about him? He entertains,” Kings coach Todd McLellan said. “And he doesn’t slow down. That’s why this talk of him approaching Wayne and his record, that’s why it’s beginning to pick up steam. And it would be great for the game and the league. I just wish he wouldn’t be so entertaining against us.”

Approaching Wayne? Pure blasphemy. Gretzky has a hammerlock on every important offensive record in NHL history, including the one for setting the most records. Ovechkin now has 742 goals, which is 152 short of Gretzky’s NHL mark.

Assuming Ovechkin scores 40 this season, that would still require the equivalent of a 31-goal average in the four remaining seasons of his new contract.

And yet Brett Hull, whom Ovechkin just passed on the goal list, scored 39 when he was 36, and Jaromir Jagr had 46 at Ovechkin’s age. Jagr stopped at 766, provided he has actually stopped. He is in third place, ahead of Ovechkin.

This year Ovechkin is averaging more ice time than any season since 2010. He has never played fewer than 71 games in a normal-length season and has played 80 or more seven times, and all 68 on the schedule two seasons ago. He isn’t gliding and dodging the locomotives the way Gretzky did. He is playing in the tangled and dark places and, as TV analyst Pierre McGuire used to say, he “hits to hurt.”

Brent Johnson was a goalie for the Capitals when Ovechkin broke in. He now coaches the Capitals’ youth team.

“I don’t know if he is going to get there or not, but he certainly isn’t slowing down,” Johnson said. “He’s hard as a rock. No matter where you touch him, he’s like iron.

“Let’s face it. If you play 82 games, you’re just beating the crap out of yourself. It doesn’t take a toll on him at all. What he does can’t be taught. Most people try to lay back and make sure he doesn’t make them look stupid. They do that and he makes them look stupid anyway.”

The signature is a blast from the left side, often on the power play, often facilitated by power-play quarterback John Carlson. Ovechkin needs four power-play goals to break Dave Andreychuk’s NHL career record of 274.

“If he gets five or six opportunities in a game, he’s going to score one or two, let’s face it,” McLellan said. “The best strategy is just stay out of the box. You try to find him, but that’s not a very hard thing to do. You know where he’ll be.”

But there were times when Ovechkin had to fight league-wide doubts, had to somehow fight his way through the playoff blues. Three times, Washington lost Game 7s to the New York Rangers. Three other times, the Caps were bounced by the Pittsburgh Penguins and Sidney Crosby, who appeared to be the leader and winner that Ovechkin was not.

That disappeared in 2018 when the Caps won the Stanley Cup and Ovechkin launched himself into a three-day orgy through bars, restaurants, Tidal Basins and everywhere else that wasn’t locked.

“I might not see him for months but when I do, we just take up where we left off,” Johnson said. “He still gets so excited when he scores goals. But he also gets excited when anybody else scores. He has so much energy, he never stops. Anybody who said he wasn’t enough of a leader to take this team to a Cup, they didn’t know a thing about him.”

Players can only be judged in their own time. One can only wonder how  Ovechkin would have frolicked in the 1980s, when the game was far less technocratic and structured and goalies were comparatively naked.

As it was Ovechkin began in the time of the two-line pass and the grabby neutral-zone and sailed into the time of the stretch pass and the interference call, and remained supreme.

Iron is stronger than change.