The first player to score 50 goals in a single season was Maurice "Rocket" Richard in 1944-45. Just a few years prior the NHL had been reduced to a six-team league and increased its number of games in a season from 48 to 50. Richard picked up goals in bunches, including a five-goal effort against the Detroit Red Wings on December 28, 1944, and while those who defended him employed every manner of obstruction to slow his scoring rate down, he carried 49 goals into the last game of the regular season. With 2:15 remaining in a tilt at the old Boston Garden, Richard managed to notch number 50 and cement his legacy in the history of the league.
Gordie Howe would be the next to flirt with the 50-goal mark, compiling 49 in the 70 games of 1952-53, and Richard's 50 would remain unmatched until 1960-61 when Bernie Geoffrion reached that achievement in 64 games. The following year Bobby Hull hit 50 in 70 games and continued a roll in 1965-66 to be the first to amass at least 50 in multiple seasons, finally settling at 5 seasons of the accolade in 1971-72.
Phil Esposito joined Hull in 1974-75 after surviving 6 seasons as the league's top scorer with 5 50+ goal efforts. Guy Lafleur became the first to achieve it for 6 seasons in 1979-80. This so happened to be the same year some rookie named Wayne Gretzky managed his first 50+ goal season en route to 9 campaigns doing the same, an honour he shares with Mike Bossy who played only 10 seasons in the NHL.
Marcel Dionne and Mario Lemieux join the 6-seasons-or-more club and, with names like Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, and Pavel Bure alongside Esposito and Bobby Hull, the 5-season crew is even pretty darn special company to be in.
So it has been a hell of a week for Alex Ovechkin. On Tuesday night, The Great 8 notched number 50 on the year in front of his home crowd at Verizon Center. Just last night in Montreal, he continued to make history as he surpassed Peter Bondra as the Washington Capitals all-time leading goal-scorer with 473 career tallies during the second period. And he didn't stop there as he pushed another past Canadien goaltender Carey Price in the third.
The thing about his 50th goal, though, is he has now scored 50+ in six seasons, and it should be seven if he had 82 games to rack up the 55 he was on pace for in 2012-13.
This is a special thing considering how scoring in the league has changed in the past decades. In the 1980s offence was coming in spades, with games averaging anywhere from 7- to 8-goals-per-game. Then in the '90s and early 2000s, aided by clutch-and-grab hockey and the prominence of the neutral zone trap, goals-per-game declined to rates we haven't since since the mid '50s and bottomed out at just over 5 right before the 2004-05 lockout.
The post-lockout world looked promising at the outset, but as goalie pads got larger and the butterfly method became more popular, we've seen goal-scoring take a dive once more. Because of the games' evolution and refinement of defencive styles, we may never see a player reach the 50-in-50 mountaintop again - which only Richard, Bossy, Gretzky (3 times), Lemieux, and Brett Hull (2 times) have done (Jari Kurri, Alexander Mogilny, Lemieux twice more, and Cam Neely receive technical honours but aren't officially recognised). Still, the caliber at which Ovechkin scores is something to celebrate for how purely unique he is.
Sure, we have finishers today - your Sidney Crosbys, Steven Stamkoses, Corey Perrys, and Evgeni Malkins - but none are on Ovi's level when it comes to putting the puck in the net. Part of that has to do with the roles these players are entrusted with. While the other four guys are relied on in offencive and defencive situations, Ovechkin's sole purpose is to score, and he has certainly taken heat for his play in his own end in the past.
It's easy to attack him as a player because he's not a "good ol', team-first Canadian boy" but when your team needs to score, you're putting #8 out on the ice and he's going to do it for you more often than not. He gets excited when he does, too, and we need players like that in the game.
We've now had 10 years of Alex Ovechkin, since we had to wait for a lockout to end before he could join as a rookie, and he has been the most consistent goal-scorer in that time by far. In fact, he has scored the 5th-most goals in the NHL since Lemieux reached 6 seasons of 50-or-more back in 1996-97, and it is worth making it abundantly clear that he didn't touch NHL ice until 2005.
Ovi will be 30 years old when the puck drops next season and history tells us that scoring declines on the wrong side of 30. Heck, even Gretzky netted 50 in a year for the last time when he was 28. We'll have to wait and see if he challenges the Great One and Bossy for a share on the 9-season mantel, but what we do know is that we are witnessing a truly historic career.
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