There are many ways to assess the impact of the Washington Capitals Alexander Ovechkin – both statistical and anecdotal – but his strong play to keep the Washington Capitals in the playoff race makes you wonder if his breakthrough season will also have an impact on the way teams draft and build their teams. Consider that last year, the skilled and highly prized Russian prospect Alexei Cherepanov slipped to No. 17 overall in the 2007 entry draft, falling to the New York Rangers, despite playing credentials that suggested he could be in the top-five skill-wise.
Lots of teams shied away from Cherepanov because of the perception that drafting Russian players was too complicated and risky – what with no transfer agreement with the Russian Federation, no real sense of when they might arrive on your doorstep, or if they'd stay once they got here. Certainly, those same negatives still exist today, almost a year later, but organizational philosophies may change, given what Ovechkin, Evgeni Malkin, Ilya Kovalchuk, Pavel Datsyuk and even Alexei Kovalev have done for their respective teams this season.
There was once a perception that Russian players wouldn't make a difference between winning and losing; and that to rely on them too heavily would undermine a team's chances for success. Ovechkin and the rest have done a pretty good job of reversing that perception – and they're doing it with the sort of panache that makes the previous generation may have lacked.
This year's answer to Cherepanov is Central Red Army's Nikita Filatov, who is considered to be one of the most skilled players in a highly anticipated draft. If teams shy away from him the way they Cherepanov – and Filatov possesses the same sort of upside that some of the other Russians drafted in the top three have had these past few years, someone might get a great bargain in June.
Certainly, it seems that every week, Alex The Great, comes up with another chart-topping performance for the Capitals and last week was no exception. On Monday, he was named the NHL's player of the week for the second time in three weeks. Once again, he led all NHL scorers in points (seven in three games. Three points in a 4-2 victory over the Nashville Predators made him the first player in franchise history to record multiple 100-point seasons and the fastest NHL player to reach 300 career points since Peter Forsberg in 1997-98. His four-point performance vs. Atlanta a few days later – two goals, two assists – brought him to the 60-goal mark, the first time that's happened since Pittsburgh's Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr did it in 1995-96. Ovechkin leads the NHL in goals (60), points (106), power-play goals (21), game-winning goals (10) and shots (410) and he's right up there in hits too – 10th overall at last count.
At 22 years, 186 days old last Friday in the game against the Thrashers, Ovechkin became the fifth-youngest player in NHL history to score 60. The four players younger than Ovechkin at the time of their 60th goal were Wayne Gretzky in 1981-82 (20 years, 359 days) and 1982-83 (22-41), Pavel Bure in 1992-93 (22-11), Mike Bossy in 1978-79 (22-62) and Mario Lemieux in 1987-88 (22-167).
Bure, Bossy and Lemieux all had longevity issues, as their careers unfolded. Even with the physical style he plays, Ovechkin has had no such difficulties, closing in on the end of his third season and having missed just one game – in his Calder Trophy-winning rookie year – in that time. All that's left now is to squeeze those Capitals of his into the playoffs and dare we hope for this? A first-round meeting with the Pittsburgh Penguins?
