Comparing Ovechkin's Stats (Malkin VS Ovechkin, Part 102)

I did a little number-crunching with stats after reading one of the comments my readers left yesterday regarding Alex Ovechkin and the fact that he's more concerned with playing physically with opposing teams having elite Russian players then when playing against teams without (and he would have more goals against those without Russian players since he's not preoccupied with head-hunting anyone).

A friend and i were discussing Ovie's headhunting of Malkin. He said that it seems that Ovie goes after Russian elite players. My friend is from NC, so He sees the `Canes, and mentioned that Ovie goes after Ilya Kovalchuk the same way.He mentioned about his point totals when he's playing against teams with "elite" Russian players? I think you'll notice a drop-off. He's too busy trying to hurt people to score.

I thought it was an interesting point and decided to do some research as mentioned above because it made me curious.

I took stats (goals scored) for Ovechkin during the regular 2007-2008 season (taken from NHL.com using the boxscore of game recaps in the schedule tab) when playing against the teams of the two players m-kim58 mentions in her comment (Evgeni Malkin and Ilya Kovalchuk) - Pittsburgh and Atlanta and compared them to 2 teams that do not have any Russian players on it - Islanders and NJ Devils.

What's even more interesting is the fact that the results are almost the complete opposite of what we were expecting. It appears that Ovechkin scores more goals when he's playing against Pittsburgh and Atlanta (having elite Russian players) from looking at the stats and making a comparison. It wasn't a large difference, but I really didn't have a lot of games to "sample" from (8-12).

Here is the breakdown:

Goals scored against Atlanta - 6
Goals scored against Pittsburgh - 3
TOTAL = 9 goals

Goals scored against New York (Islanders) - 2
Goals scored against New Jersey - 0
TOTAL = 2 goals

He scores a little over 4 times as much against Pittsburgh and Atlanta than he does when playing the Islanders and Devils. The only explanation I can offer is:

1. we are way off on our thinking and he isn't as pre-occupied with Malkin as we believe (I find this hard to believe because everytime he turned around, Malkin was being pushed around by Ovechkin); OR
2. not only is Ovechkin motivated to be physical with the "Russian elite" on opposing teams, but also to work harder to score goals at the same time which would be exhausting.

Bottom line, he either doesn't spend as much time going after Malkin or spends more energy to be both physical and score goals.

If anyone else has any thoughts (or thinks comparing other stats would allow me to come up with better / more accurate results, let me know) - I'd LOVE to hear what everyone else is thinking!