“He’s definitely a very, very, very good player,” the Washington Capitals’ director of amateur scouting, Ross Mahoney, told reporters on the night of the NHL entry draft in June 2004. He was talking about Alex Ovechkin, who the team picked first overall that night. “How good will he be?” Mahoney asked. “Time will tell.” Now, nearly 21 years later, time has had its say. On Sunday afternoon in a game against the New York Islanders, Ovechkin scored his 895th goal, passing Wayne Gretzky’s all-time NHL scoring record, a tally that had stood since 29 March 1999 and that few believed would ever be broken.
Had things been slightly different in 2004, we might have been having this conversation a year ago. The NHL season after Ovechkin’s draft – the 2004-05 campaign – never happened, replaced instead by a long dispute between the league and the players’ union. Ovechkin bided his time in Russia, where he played 37 games with Dynamo Moscow. Finally, in autumn of 2005, he stepped on to NHL ice for Washington and, as Mahoney – and everyone else – expected by that time, he proved immediately to be a very good player. Ovechkin scored two goals in his first game, the first of an eventual 52 on the season (alongside 54 assists).
That rookie year tally included what is still regarded as one of the most impressive, and improbable, goals of all time. During a game against the Phoenix Coyotes, Ovechkin somehow scored while sliding along the ice on his back, facing away from the Coyotes net. “It was unbelievable,” Auston Matthews, who was eight at the time and at the game that night, later recalled. “Nobody really cheered, they really couldn’t get their heads wrapped around what just happened. It was pretty crazy.” Also not cheering was the coach standing behind the Coyotes’ bench that night: Wayne Gretzky.
When Ovechkin helped bring the Stanley Cup to Washington in 2018, the first in the team’s history, he fulfilled the expectations that had followed him for his 12 NHL seasons to that point. And it certainly seemed like he knew it. Nobody celebrated with the Cup quite like Ovi did – nor, frankly, has anyone done it with the same reckless abandon since. The Cup also meant that Ovechkin solidified himself among the greats – as a man capable of scoring, but also winning. On that count, until Ovi began to close in on Gretzky’s goal record, he was most closely compared to Sidney Crosby, who entered the NHL a season after Ovechkin. The two have never been exactly stylistically identical, yet their points totals have tracked along eerily similar trajectories for the entirety of their careers. But until the Caps’ Cup, Crosby – with three championships – was usually regarded as the more accomplished player overall. While Ovechkin’s goal record may not fully balance things out, it seems fitting that, with it, the two players will likely be regarded in the long run as equals – the best examples of what the NHL has to offer.
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On the ice, anyway. Elsewhere, Ovechkin’s astonishing playing career may always be accompanied by an asterisk: a note about his unsavory, full-throated support for Vladimir Putin. In 2017, Ovechkin launched Putin Team, a social movement that, as he wrote in an Instagram post at the time, “unites people who are proud of their country and want to make Russia stronger.” It went on to say that Putin Team was for people who valued Putin’s “trust in and respect for his people, his fairness [and] righteousness, and the fact that he really cares.” Ovechkin recruited other Russian athletes to the cause, including Crosby’s longtime Pittsburgh Penguins teammate, Evgeny Malkin. In a separate post at the time, Ovechkin wrote that “I never hid my relationship with [Putin], always openly supported him.” Indeed, Ovechkin stood alongside Putin in his Instagram profile photo.
In 2022, after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, Ovechkin was less open about the closeness of that relationship, but fell well short of criticizing the Russian leader. Unlike fellow Russian NHLer Artemi Panarin – who said, among other things, that Putin “no longer understands what’s right and what’s wrong” – Ovechkin only said that he didn’t want to see anyone get hurt or killed in the conflict and that he hoped “it was going to be over and we are going to be living in a good world.” As for whether he still supported Putin, Ovechkin said, “Well, he’s my president, but [like] I said, I’m not in politics, I’m an athlete.”
Obviously, that’s never really been true for Ovechkin, but it also feels increasingly that it can’t be true for anyone. When Ovi started out, perhaps athletes could more easily separate their sport persona with the world beyond the game. But over the course of the two decades of Ovechkin’s career, the political and cultural environment has changed significantly, as has the broad perspective of past actions. Now, nobody is free from scrutiny, and whatever dotted line that some athletes once tried to draw between politics from sports in the past, is now gone. Even Gretzky isn’t immune. Where for decades Gretzky was considered untouchable, his own recent close association with a controversial politician, Donald Trump, has undermined his greatness in the eyes of many of his fellow Canadians. The Great One is now, as they say, The Great Once.
Ovechkin is still great, as far as the hockey goes. That’s undeniable. But just as on his draft day only time could tell how great a player he’d be, history will now dictate how great he is ultimately considered to have been. When he talked to reporters after the game in Phoenix in 2006 where Ovechkin scored his greatest goal, Gretzky said it was “pretty nice.” “He’s a phenomenal player ... He deserves all the accolades he’s getting.” That’s still true. But by the same token, he will deserve everything else, too.