Ovechkin - Caps @ Pens - 21 January, 2008
The HockeyWashington hope in June 2004, when the Capitals then made Alexander Ovechkin the first selection in the NHL Entry Draft, was that he’d be not only a dominant performer around whom the team could be rebuilt, but that he’d be a transformational figure — outsized in his impact such that even Washington’s Redskin-centric big media would fall in love with him, and in turn, at long last give his sport its due.
He is, and the coverage is coming.
Beginning with his stage-stealing performance as a 16-year-old at the World Junior Championships in 2001 — he scored 18 points in eight games as a young midget in that tournament widely regarded as the world’s best — the hockey world waited for him to claim the mantle as the world’s best player.
He would do so this week.
Through his first two-and-a-half NHL seasons Ovechkin performed in high-octane, highlight-reel fashion, earning a well-deserved Calder Trophy in 2005, All-Star game selections, and most especially displaying on a nightly basis an unprecedented package of brutal power and dynamic offensive virtuosity. From his very first game he was recognized as ranking in the game’s elite, but last season he was merely terrific while the wunderkid Sid went Hart on him. A qualitative differentiation among elites appeared to have set in.
Then last weekend in Atlanta Ovechkin made the 2008 All Star Game his own. As an event it was a meagerly competitive showcase of oddly conceived skills drills, followed by shinny on Sunday; in hockey’s buffet, a mid-season pause for Pop Tarts and soda pop. But in the free-wheeling schlock of a shootout exercise AO made like Michael in his creativity and flair, and in an instant the sheet without Sidney didn’t seem so small.
The Caps were outclassed and blanked in Montreal in their first game back from the break, and on Thursday morning there was a palpable sense that a home-and-home sweep by the Habs might usher in the first slump of the Bruce Boudreau era. That was, it appears, a primal challenge for Ovie. That and Alex Kovalev’s high-stick hello in Thursday night’s opening seconds. Alex got mad, Alex’s team needed a victory, and so Alex decided the outcome — but in a manner that is now known as the Ovechkin hat trick: something broken (perhaps a nose), certainly some stitches, and goals in every period, including a game-winner in OT. Also, hit everything that moves. Hard. No surprise at this site: a talented hockey blogger — our good friend Peerless — coined it. A performance that saw Ovie pass Sidney in aura and Howe in bravado.
Not a bad night’s work.
Following came the Ray Ferraro video. The Washington Post getting engaged in the buzz. The fawning and head-shakings of his All Star peers published and broadcast. Canadian partisans a month ago singing Sidney’s anthem now are serenading Ovechkin’s supremacy — and doing so, befitting their heritage, with gratitude, for Alex’s ascension means that hockey has gotten better.
When in April 2004 the Entry Draft lottery results were made known at noontime that very sunny day I made a friend leave work and drive far and furiously to purchase Russian beer. That same friend rang my cell phone as I exited Verizon Center Thursday night.
“You were right then,” he told me. “He will will us to a Cup.”
On Friday morning my father rang my cell from a hotel in south Florida, where he was set to begin a sailboat vacation in the Caribbean. Traveling on Thursday night, he hadn’t been able to see the game. Early Friday morning, with his hotel cafe coffee, he glanced up at a flatscreen’s sports highlight segment of Thursday night.
“It was three minutes long,” he told me. “It led with Ovechkin. All of his goals. They showed all of them. Then they replayed all of them, in slow motion, as if the sportscaster anticipated that his viewers wouldn’t believe the results replayed in actual speed.”
This breaking news over-coverage was taking place in south Florida.
“We in Washington have our Gretzky,” my father concluded.
