On the brink of NHL history, Ovechkin’s off-ice presence is equally incredible

All photos courtesy of Getty Images

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With Alex Ovechkin on the precipice of rewriting a piece of hockey history that was once thought indelible, maybe it’s natural that we want to put it all into perspective.

As if catching or surpassing Wayne Gretzky as the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer, long considered a standard that could never, would never be broached, can be explained.

Maybe that’s why the chase, the relentless manner in which Ovi has continued to fill NHL nets in recent days and months, has been so captivating.

Because in many ways, it defies description. Not that it will stop us from trying.

The Great 8 has taken the entire hockey world along for one of the wildest rides in the game’s storied history.

Hop on the ride

Mike Knuble is the only NHL player to have assisted on goals by both Wayne Gretzky and Alex Ovechkin. He’s the only player to have shared a locker room with each of the iconic forwards.

After winning a Stanley Cup with the Detroit Red Wings in 1997-98, Knuble was traded to the New York Rangers, joining Gretzky for what would be The Great One’s last season in the NHL.

More than a decade later, having established himself as one of the preeminent power forwards in the league, Knuble joined Ovechkin and the Capitals amid a run of eight straight seasons with 20 or more goals.

In both cases, with the incomparable Gretzky nearing the end and Ovechkin hitting his stride as a force of nature, Knuble found the buzz around those teams to be unique in their own rights.

“I kind of saw playing with Wayne a little bit, what it's like to play with a major superstar and there's a little different vibe around a team when there's a superstar in his prime,” Knuble said.

Gretzky, Ovechkin, Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby, Connor McDavid – as a player, there’s just something different about sharing a locker room with an athlete of that stature.

“There’s a little more, I don't know, you're a rock and roll band a little bit, there's just a little more action around the hotel, there's a little more action around the rink, there's a little more people trying to see you, a little more people trying to get close to the team and a little more local fans, it's a little bit more,” Knuble explained.

“So, it’s really fun. … I think that's what I remember, there's just that excitement of a superstar in the making, or a superstar in progress,” Knuble said.

The day Knuble signed as a free agent with the Capitals in the summer of 2009, he got a call from Ovechkin, who would not assume the team’s captaincy until later that season.

“I was literally doing a deal in the driveway,” Knuble recalled with a laugh. “I was standing there with a full trailer of stuff and eventually, as the hour goes by, or two hours go by, you commit to Washington, and then, sure enough, the phone rings and it's Alex, and it's nine hours ahead, or seven hours ahead, whatever it is [in Russia], and you can hear him in the club, you can hear the beat of the club behind him, and he's like, ‘Hey, welcome to Washington. It would be great to play with you.’”

Knuble, who has two boys currently playing Division I hockey, shared the Ovechkin message with his family. Cool doesn’t quite cover it, and that was Knuble’s introduction to the world according to Ovechkin.

“What you saw is what you got and I don't think he was trying to hide anything, the way he operated, from anybody,” Knuble said.

“He was just the type of guy, ‘I'm here on this ride if you want to get on this. Playing for the Washington Capitals is like an amusement park ride, you want to get on this ride because it's going to be fun, so hop on board, and I'm the captain of it, I'm the captain of this ride, and we're going for a ride here, one way or another,’” Knuble said. “So, that's kind of what it was like, it'll be fun one way or another.”

The early years: Cantaloupe, Russian Fred Flinstone

Over the years, I spent a lot of time around the Washington Capitals, and by extension, spent a lot of time around and talking with Ovechkin.

During his rookie season in 2005-06, when he and Sidney Crosby were the fresh new faces of the NHL, I often attended those must-watch games between the Capitals and the Penguins.

It felt like magic when the two teams met in the playoffs for the first time in 2009.

In Game 2, both Crosby and Ovechkin recorded hat tricks, as though to reinforce their respective places in the hockey universe.

I was on hand when Crosby won each of his three Stanley Cups and was likewise in Vegas in June of 2018 when Ovechkin finally lifted the Cup.

But it’s the time I spent with Ovechkin away from the rink that stands out as he approaches immortality as the game’s greatest goal-scorer.

I remember having lunch with Ovechkin near the team’s practice facility in Arlington, Virginia, as he described growing up in Russia and shooting pucks into an old net at his parents’ dacha during the summer.

It’s a story not so dissimilar than the stories of Crosby shooting pucks into his parents’ dryer or the stories told by dozens of NHL players about their formative years.

Washington owner Ted Leonsis told me in an interview about the night the team took Ovechkin with the first overall pick in the 2004 NHL Draft. Ovechkin showed up at a pre-draft party in Washington and was greeting people as though he was the maître d, Leonsis recalled.

Ovi later consumed what Leonsis figured was three cantaloupes from the buffet.

In the days leading up to the 2011 Winter Classic, I was asked to sit down with both Crosby and Ovechkin, in Pittsburgh and Washington, respectively, for a chat to help set up the outdoor game.

By the time I got to the Capitals’ practice facility, it was snowing heavily and everyone was antsy to get the interview over with.

A freelance camera operator had been hired and we were sitting in a boardroom as he set up lights and the camera gear. Perhaps sensing the urgency to get things done, he was a bit flustered and accidentally knocked over a heavy, metal light stand.

It crashed down inches from Ovechkin’s head.

There was a moment of stunned silence. And then, Ovechkin looked at me, smiled and then laughed, acknowledging that it had been a close call.

Long-time Washington communications department staffer, Nate Ewell, muttered something about seeing his career flash before his eyes and the interview went on as though nothing had happened.

Later, I was in Washington to do a story on then head coach Barry Trotz, who had invited me to join the team as they were visiting Andrew Air Force Base.

Some of the players were given the opportunity to don a padded uniform used in training military security dogs. Ovechkin was the first in the get-up – of course he was –  and by extension the first to be set upon by the ferocious German Shepherd.

Trotz and I looked at each other with arched eyebrows and I asked what the call to GM George McPhee would be like to explain that their franchise player had had his arm ripped off by a dog. Trotz chuckled – but only a bit.

Luckily, it never came to that.

Finally, the most memorable experience I had with Ovechkin was a night at a Washington area bowling alley.

A local family had bid on and won a night with the Capitals’ Russian players, including Ovechkin, as part of the team’s foundation fundraiser.

I wondered how it would all unfold with the language barriers and with Ovechkin’s status as one of the game’s icons. But he couldn’t have been more welcoming and friendly and there wasn’t a single moment of awkwardness.

Imagine a Russian Fred Flintstone and you have an idea of what the bowling was like, with balls regularly crashing into the gutter on either side of the lane soon after leaving Ovechkin’s grip.

Sometimes the ball seemed never to touch the alley itself, but reached the pins like one of his patented one-timers from the circle.

For part of the night, he delivered strikes or misses with the laces undone on his bowling shoes.

Ovechkin bowled like he played, ferociously and without abandon.

From the moment he arrived in North America to this very day, Ovechkin has answered questions in happy times and in times of great frustration.

He has bowled with fans and welcomed literally hundreds of teammates through the door to the Capitals locker room.

He once agreed to wear a fuzzy bunny suit for a special holiday performance in which the team was involved.

I asked him about the costume and he shrugged his shoulders. Why not? It was fun.

Since then, he has continued to score.

In spite of missing more than a month with a broken leg earlier this season, he has quieted any talk that maybe Gretzky’s record wouldn’t fall.

“Who’s coaching that team?”

Glen Hanlon was Ovechkin’s first NHL head coach. He was also, by chance, the netminder who was victimized by Gretzky on his first NHL goal.

Funny the lines that bind all of this together, no?

The summer before Ovechkin’s rookie season, Hanlon went to Russia to meet with Ovechkin and his Russian coach.

Ovechkin was taking some English classes.

Unlike some European players whose discomfort with the language in North America makes them hesitant to deal with the media for fear of being misunderstood or made to look foolish, Ovechkin was preparing for the long haul.

“By the time he got here he had already been playing with men, he didn't have that coming out of junior hockey body, so he didn't have to go through the three or four years of trying to develop,” Hanlon said.

“And he was durable, he could stand the pain. There were games you knew he was injured, you saw him trying to get ready for the game, and you're going, ‘Oh, jeez, I hope he can make it,’ and not once did he ever go, ‘No, I can't do this, not tonight.’ He just pushed through.”

Early on, the Capitals were just trying to figure out what kind of team they would be led by the wrecking ball of a Russian winger they’d selected first overall in 2004.

Hanlon jokes that when things went well, he felt observers were amazed and asked, “Like, who’s coaching that team?”

Then, when things went sideways, which was more often than not the first couple of years, Hanlon imagined those same observers asking the same question, just more derisively, “Like, ‘Who’s coaching that team,’” Hanlon said with a laugh from Italy, where he coaches HC Bolzano.

One of my favourite lines about Ovechkin and those young Capitals teams came from Hanlon, who described his team being like a bunch of loveable puppies frolicking in a park. But sometimes, their play was more like when one of those puppies ran off into traffic.

Even through those growing pains, Ovechkin seemed to instinctively know what his role was with the team, that he was special, that he was going to be counted on to do more, but that he was not apart from the group.

“I remember going to him one time, and we had to show some video, and it was a pretty productive video, to show what wasn't going right, and we needed to use him, and he had no trouble with it,” Hanlon recalled. “He’s like, ‘You know coach, whatever you need, I'm just like everybody else.’ And, so for us, it was real easy, it was really easy, yeah.”

Long before the Capitals selected defenceman Karl Alzner fifth overall in the 2007 NHL Draft, he was always picking up the newspaper or looking on his phone to check out how Ovechkin and Crosby were faring.

“Ovi and Sid were two guys that I was already very, very focused on while I was playing junior. I was keeping track every single morning that they played and making sure that I knew everything that was happening with their stats, with their team, all that. This was before I was even drafted, so I was, I was fairly dialed into it,” Alzner recalled.

When he joined the Capitals, Alzner wasn’t exactly in awe of the team’s superstar as in, ‘Geez, Ovi knows my name,’ but he wasn’t exactly not in awe of him, either.

“I wasn't probably quite on that level, but at the same time I knew the magnitude of what it was that I got to be a part of,” Alzner said. “I knew this was a pretty big deal.”

Like Knuble, Alzner recalls the sometimes-fractured syntax that Ovechkin employed with teammates and the media, especially when he was animated.

Alzner recalled a popular phrase the rest of the Capitals adopted thanks to Ovechkin, who at various times, would suggest the team was not going to ‘be suck’ or ‘you’re a suck’, or a variation on that theme.

“It just kind of took the team by storm,” Alzner said. “After you finished a game, and you're getting changed, and one of the guys would be, ‘Man, I was a suck today’. It was like unintentionally a bonding moment. He created something special for the team, and not on purpose.”

Alzner has retired from playing, but remains in the Washington area, sometimes providing analysis for Capitals games on the team’s broadcasts.

He admits that he views Ovechkin’s race to surpass Gretzky’s record more as a fan than he’s ever been before.

“I find myself getting kind of caught up into this goal chase, and the team playing so well, where I'm trying to let myself be more of a fan, and, and really kind of understand what's happening and have fun with it because this is a massive record that's going to be broken by a player I spent majority of my career playing with, and got to see a lot of, the behind-the-scenes stuff of how he's been able to do it,” Alzner said. “So, yeah, I feel like I am getting caught up in the fandom of it, and realizing how big of an actual moment it's going to be.”