Connor McDavid And Alex Ovechkin Headline NHL’s Milestone-Seekers In 2024-25

They come from two different hockey generations. But Connor McDavid and Alex Ovechkin will both be attacking the NHL’s record books during the 2024-25 regular season.

McDavid Targets 1,000 Points
McDavid, the Edmonton Oilers captain, will be chasing down 1,000 career NHL points. Last season, he finished third in the Art Ross Trophy race with 132 points, and became just the fourth player in NHL history to record 100 assists in a single season (then was joined two days later by Nikita Kucherov, as the fifth)

McDavid will come into the new season with 982 points, so he’ll need 18 to hit four digits. Based on his career average of 1.52 points per game, he could hit the milestone somewhere around Game 12 of the season, which would be a Battle of Alberta game in Calgary on Sunday, Nov. 3.

While McDavid is the ultimate team-first player, he does have a sweet incentive to try to hit the mark a little sooner. On Nov. 3, he’d be 27 years, nine months and 21 days old — six days older than Steve Yzerman was when he reached 1,000 on Feb. 24, 1993..

To claim third place from Yzerman, McDavid would have to get to 18 points by no later than Game 10, on Oct. 28 in Columbus. If he does, he’ll sit only behind Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux as the youngest ever to hit 1,000 points.

Currently with 647 career assists, McDavid should also have no trouble hitting the 700-assist milestone this season.

He also has the chance to become just the fourth player ever to log eight 100-point seasons in his career — in just his 10th year in the NHL. The only others are Gretzky, Lemieux and Marcel Dionne.

A pair of Nova Scotians could also reach 1,000 points this season. Brad Marchand of the Boston Bruins is currently at 929 while Nathan MacKinnon of the Colorado AvalancheAVAX 0.0% is at 899.

Marchand needs 71 points, but has finished at 67 in each of the last two seasons. So MacKinnon may end up overtaking him. He has broken 100 points in each of the last two years, and finished second in the scoring race last season with a career-high 140 points.

Ovechkin’s Goal Chase Is Back On
Last fall, it was starting to look like maybe Wayne Gretzky’s all-time mark of 894 goals might be unreachable after all. After moving into second place all-time in December of 2022, Alex Ovechkin hit one of the worst slumps of his career. From the beginning of last season until the All-Star break, he managed just nine goals

But business picked up in the second half. As Washington pushed its way into a playoff spot, Ovechkin potted 22 goals in the last 35 games of the year, getting him to 31 for the year and 853 for his career.

He now needs 41 goals to match Gretzky. And history suggests that he could do that this year. Ovechkin has hit 40 in 13 of his 19 NHL seasons, more than any other player — most recently just two years ago, in 2022-23.

His Washington Capitals have also made a case for being one of the NHL’s most-improved teams during the offseason, adding scoring punch up front with the acquisitions of Pierre-Luc Dubois and Andrew Mangiapane as well as two reliable defensemen in Jakob Chychrun and Matt Roy.

With a more talented supporting cast, the table is set for Ovechkin to try to make himself the NHL’s all-time leading goal-scorer.

The Great 8 also needs just three assists to hit 700 in his career. Six more game-winning goals would also tie him with Jaromir Jagr for the most of all time, 135.