Twenty-two seasons. More goals than anybody who has ever played the game. A record that was not supposed to be broken, broken.
Column: the views expressed are the writer’s own and not necessarily those of The Hockey Beast.
The last months of Alex Ovechkin’s career should have been a procession: the tribute video in every building, the gift from the opposing captain, the 30 seconds where a crowd that spent two decades booing him decides to stand up instead, because he is never coming back.
Instead, he arrives in Ottawa on Tuesday with one goal in 15 games, a demonstration forming outside the arena, and a petition circulating that asks his own host country to sanction him.
A magnificent career, a flat ending
Purely as hockey, this is a sad thing to watch.
Whatever anybody thinks of the man, the player was one of the most purely enjoyable things the sport has produced in 40 years: the one-timer from the left circle that everybody in the building knew was coming and nobody could stop, two decades of goal totals that stopped looking real, a scoring record against every opponent in the league that reads like a misprint. That career deserved an ending with some ceremony. It could have been so different.
And the goals drying up is the smallest part of why it is not. Production declines. It happens to everybody, and it is supposed to. A 41-year-old in his twenty-second season scoring once in 15 games is not a scandal; it is a career arriving at its natural end, and every hockey supporter on earth would have accepted it without a word of complaint. Most would have stood up and applauded anyway, because that is what the goals bought him.
The part that is harder to look past
What is harder is the support for the man who ordered the war against Ukraine.
There has never really been much doubt about where Ovechkin stands on Vladimir Putin. He has said it himself over years, long before this became a matter of protests outside arenas. To his credit, after Russia invaded in 2022, he called for the war to end, and that should be in the record alongside everything else. But the broader position was never hidden.
What changed is that the advertisement in September made it current again. A campaign film for Putin’s political party, in the last year of a career, with every record already won and nothing left to gain from it, and the questions arrived at the league’s own door rather than only at his. An old position that most of the sport had learned to walk past became a fresh decision that it could not.
Nobody is going to make him answer
Has any of it affected his hockey? Nobody can know. He is 41 and in his twenty-second season, which alone explains a drop in scoring. Guessing in either direction is still guessing.
What we can see is smaller. He has stopped answering the questions. He walked out of an interview rather than take them. And the criticism has reached his family, because his mother has spoken about how he is handling it. A man can look untroubled in public and still be carrying it. Nobody outside his own head knows.
The last NHL season of the greatest goal scorer the game has had is turning into anything but a victory procession. He will finish with the record, and the record will outlast all of this. The farewell is the part he doesn’t get back, and whether he would make the advertisement again, we’ll never know.
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