We've Never Seen Anyone Shoot Their Shot Like Alex Ovechkin

Let's all take a moment to grab a tall glass of room temperature vodka, sit back, reflect, and appreciate the greatness of the big Russian who will go down as one of the best pure goal scorers we've ever seen.

Alex Ovechkin notched his 600th career goal on Monday night, becoming just the 20th player—and the third youngest—to hit the elusive mark. He's only the third player to score 600 goals with one team and is one of only four to score 600 in fewer than 1000 games, putting him in quite an exclusive and elite group of all-time greats including Wayne Gretzky, Mike Bossy, and Mario Lemieux.

Evgeny Kuznetsov, who assisted on Ovi's milestone marker, pretty much summed up how truly hard it is to bury that many tallies in the NHL—even for arguably the goal-scoring GOAT.

"That's a free meal for me, for sure. It's huge. When you look at those numbers, you don't even think it's 599, 600. But then when you understand—holy fuck that's a lot of goals," Kuznetsov said after the game, according to Isabelle Khurshudyan of the Washington Post.

It is a ton of snipes, indeed, and Ovechkin has scored at a rate rarely seen in the NHL, especially in the modern era. Despite beginning his NHL career in 2005, he leads the league in goals since 1998-99 and is the only player to score 30 or more in each season since 2005-06. His average of 0.61 goals per game is fourth in NHL history (minimum 400 games played) and, amazingly, this dude is only in his early 30s.

Scoring goals in the NHL is damn difficult, and no one has done it quite like Ovi.

At age 32, Ovechkin has a chance to hit 50 goals for the eighth (EIGHTH!!) time in his career, a mark only bettered by Gretzky and Bossy, who have each hit the half-century mark in a season nine times. Though Ovi sits one 50-goal campaign behind the two greats, he's played during one of the lowest-scoring eras in NHL history and at a time when goaltenders and defenders are bigger and better than they've ever been.

During the 12 seasons between 1977 and 1989, a period which saw Bossy and Gretzky hit the half-century mark 18 times combined, there was a grand total of 82 50-tally seasons, an average of nearly seven 50-goal scorers per season. In the 12 campaigns since Ovechkin entered the league in 2005-06, the half-century mark has only been hit 20 times—an average of fewer than two per season with Ovechkin claiming seven of those himself.

Bossy and Gretzky also had the luxury of tallying the majority of their goals on goaltenders who simply weren't as big or nearly as good as those Ovechkin has to face on a nightly basis. The average size of a goaltender in 2015 was 74.2 inches, or just over 6'2", and weighed in at 201.3 pounds—both all-time highs, according to Stats LLC. That's six percent taller and nearly 14 percent heavier than the average netminder in 1983-84. Save percentage has also climbed steadily since the 1980s, with the league-wide SV% ballooning from .875 in 1984-85 to .916 in 2015-16.

So, as Ovechkin looks poised to at least reach the top five in all-time goals before his career is up, his next destination could be the elusive 800 club. At his current pace and depending on his ability to stay as healthy as he has through the first chunk of his NHL career, it looks more than likely that Ovi can become just the third player, alongside Gretzky and Gordie Howe, to hit that mark.

If No. 8, who has only missed a total of 28 games in 13 NHL seasons, can put together another six 30-plus-goal seasons, he'll be right in the 800-goal range. Seeing as Ovechkin has never scored fewer than 32, even during his worst seasons, and may be able to pump out another couple of 40-50 goal campaigns, Ovi actually has a chance to not only hit 800, but possibly climb even higher.

On top of a goal-scoring prowess we haven't seen for a generation, Ovechkin has brought—through his passionate celebrations, candidness with the media, and vibrant personality—a fun, child-like dimension to a league that so often gets criticized for harbouring a robot-like culture amongst its star players. It's another reason we like him so much.

Wherever he ends up when all is said and done, it's been a damn pleasure to watch Ovechkin light it up as well as anyone ever has.