The Alex Ovechkin Eras: Eight spans that define the Great 8 - ESPN

Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin has tied Wayne Gretzky's all-time record of 894 career goals.

Ovechkin scored his first goal in his first NHL game as a fresh-faced rookie in Oct. 2005. Everything that happened after led to this history-making moment for the superstar winger, years of joy and pain that made Ovechkin the player — and eventually the champion — he'd become.

Welcome to the Alex Ovechkin Eras Tour, eight distinct epochs that defined «The Great 8» over the past 20 years.

The 2003-04 season wasn't the lowest point in Capitals' history, which was the 1974-75 team that earned eight wins in 80 games and had the worst points percentage (.131) ever in the NHL. But it was the culmination of a slow slide into mediocrity for a team that played for the Stanley Cup in 1998.

The Capitals had taken an enormous swing under owner Ted Leonsis, who had purchased the team in July 1999, when they traded for Pittsburgh Penguins superstar Jaromir Jagr in July 2001. It didn't work out: Jagr's output was a far cry from his MVP-level play for the Penguins. After 190 games in Washington, he was traded to the New York Rangers in 2004.

From that moment on, the Capitals were in «everything must go» mode, trading Peter Bondra, Robert Lang, Sergei Gonchar, Michael Nylander, Anson Carter and Mike Grier in a six-week span. The Capitals won only twice in their final 13 games.

Yet Washington had only the third-best chance of securing the first overall pick in the 2004 NHL draft. They had a 14.2% chance of winning the lottery, behind Pittsburgh (25%) and Chicago (18.8%). But after their worst regular season in 26 years, something finally went right: The Capitals secured the first overall pick, and with it, the chance to select Alex