Alex Ovechkin has been in the National Hockey League so long that he’s developed a little bit of a D.C. twang – somewhere in the linguistic territory between Baltimore and Virginia.
His nemesis, Sidney Crosby, has been around 14 years and it doesn’t seem long at all. Crosby is perpetually boyish.
Ovechkin’s been around the same amount of time and it seems like forever. He has a 50-year-old’s head on a 25-year-old body. More than anyone else in the game, he looks veteran.
In this process of blending in, Ovechkin’s also developed the dead-eyed, “pucks in deep” conversational style perfected by his North American colleagues. He rarely says anything interesting, but because everything is muddled into an Anglo-Slavic mélange, it can occasionally sound deep.
“You can see we can play very nice hockey,” Ovechkin said apropos of the Washington Capitals’ recent slump. The sentence is poetically metric, meaningless and not something you’d expect to hear from a Canadian.
For a long time, a lot of fans didn’t like Ovechkin – the touchdown goal celebrations, the woo-hooing, the unapologetic foreignness – but he’s graduated to a generalized tolerance edging into cult status.
People have warmed to Ovechkin because he is never anyone but himself. In a league full of largely indistinguishable, rule-following automatons, he is the great dissenter.
Ovechkin decided to play Wednesday night in Toronto. The NHL had given him a choice once he’d let them know he had no interest in attending this weekend’s all-star festivities – be suspended for one game before the break, or one game after. Ovechkin chose the long-weekend option.
“My body needs a rest,” Ovechkin explained. Wisely, he left it at that. No apologies to fans or teammates. No pretending to be tortured by the choice. He didn’t want to do it, so he didn’t.
Who can blame him? All all-star games are farce, but the NHL’s is a special case. Even the National Football League has the sense to do it after the regular season, so that no one cares that much if they turn an ankle.
Hockey fans are instead treated to what amounts to the world’s most expensive outburst of figure skating, as a couple of dozen guys try not to injure themselves while also not playing a professional level of hockey.
It’s a little like watching the world’s greatest firefighters get together once a year to spray water at an imaginary fire. The skills are all there, but without any stakes, it’s hard to care.
Despite being voted one of four captains (and how does that make any sense?), Ovechkin is the one guy willing to call things by their proper names. The all-star game doesn’t matter. So Ovechkin treated it with due deference.
Even the players still new to this can’t fake it entirely. The Leafs’ Auston Matthews will be there. Asked what he’s most looking forward to, the Arizona native chose sunshine and the days following this goonshow when it’ll “be nice not to think about hockey at all.”
In athletic middle age, Ovechkin has become less and less compliant with unspoken rules.
When the league announced a couple of years ago that it was skipping the Olympics in Korea, Ovechkin was the one guy who flipped his lid.
“Somebody is going to tell me, ‘Don’t go'? I don’t care. I just go.”
If just a few other stars had had the mettle to join up with his protest, things might have turned out differently. Ovechkin was instead left out there dangling. In a bit of karmic justice, Russia won anyway.
It was hard not to view Ovechkin’s endless, sodden Stanley Cup celebration as a sort of rebuke to the league. The done thing is drinking a little Champagne out of it, then taking it to your hometown and letting the guy who owns the hardware store take a picture with it.
It is not the done thing to use the Stanley Cup as a keg-stand prop; or to be found lolling in a fountain, mid-‘celebration,’ while in a state of dishevelment that would have made Keith Moon blush.
I am not a supporter of the way Ovechkin handled himself postchampionship. Not on any moral grounds, mind you. But because the whole thing looked like a recipe for gout.
Even Ovechkin’s politics are so peculiar that no one in the league can quite process them. He is a big supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He once declared himself a member of “team” Putin (one assumes this is a team on which the goalie knows which guy always gets to score).
When the Washington Post asked him how people reacted to his stand, Ovechkin said, “It’s been good reactions; it’s been bad reactions … people have own mind, own views.”
That sounds like a pretty good approach to life, but it’s not exactly in step with our polarized times.
But Ovechkin’s gotten what amounts to a pass. He isn’t asked about much any more, and doesn’t go out of his way to make himself conspicuous. One assumes that while people may not admire his politics, they respect that he makes his own decisions.
While this year’s Capitals’ team is a streaky outfit, Ovechkin continues to put up remarkable numbers. He leads the league in goals. He’s about to overtake Sergei Fedorov as the most productive Russian-born player in NHL history.
All that’s left to figure out is his place in the pantheon. The Cup win allows him to be included in “best ever” talk, though few would call him out in the first pass of names. Ovechkin has spent too much time in Crosby’s shadow for that.
But whenever he leaves, his quality of play won’t be the thing we miss most. It is his outstanding outsider-ness that made Ovechkin remarkable. He was the most unusual figure of his generation, and several of them before. He showed the league that you can be different and still thrive.
Few have followed his example, but at least we have it.
Cathal Kelly