If you take away all his goals, he’d be the highest scoring player of all time on assists alone.
This is true, but every other time you’ve used the word “goals” in this post it should be “points”, points = goals + assists. Every goal has at most two assists, but typically the ratio is around ~1.5 assists for every goal. As you say, Gretzky has the record for goals and then also has more assists than any other player has points, which is ludicrously dominant.
One of the most wild things to me is how boring Gretzky highlights are. If you look at highlight footage of the other generational hockey players - Lemieux, Ovechkin, Crosby, McDavid - these guys are insane athletes who are capable of outmuscling and embarrassing the opposition. Gretzky was not a freak athlete, he just had intuition for where to be on a better level than anyone else ever has. I remember reading that when he was eight he got an exception to play in a league for ten-year-olds and completely tore it up, like five points per game, in spite of being the tiniest kid on the ice every night.
It’s not even well documented what he was doing because the NHL typically had only one camera per game in the eighties, the one following the puck, and his dominance came from where he was going when he didn’t have the puck.
If you watch hockey, every so often there will be a game where a guy doesn’t particularly stand out, but then you look on the scoresheet at the end and realize he got four points. You think I guess that he had a good game tonight. I imagine watching Gretzky was this exact feeling, except then you realize you’re fifty games into the season and this is like the thirtieth time this has happened.
Ovechkin is actually in striking distance of breaking the goals record, but 50 goals (42? I don’t remember where he ended the season.) is a large number for anyone to hit past 38. It’s pretty rare for a player to be good enough to still have a roster spot by that point, let alone score 50 in the remainder of their career. Has anyone besides Howe (in the 1970s) scored over 40 goals after 38?
In any case, I’m hoping he can break it. Ten years ago literally no one thought a major Gretzky record could be even remotely in jeopardy. It was not something anyone would give serious consideration.