WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Pittsburgh Penguins wanted to say thank you, but Alexander Ovechkin just wanted to go home.
He laughed. They lingered. He insisted. They stayed. He waved them away, again and again. Eventually, Ovechkin’s longtime sporting nemeses relented, and the pack of white and black and yellow made its way down the tunnel and out of sight.
Ovechkin, the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer, might be hanging up his skates this summer. He also might not be. Nobody, including the 40-year-old star, knows with any certainty. But with his hair graying, his body decaying and his contract expiring, the end is rapidly creeping up on an all-time great.
And so, just in case this was it, Washington hockey fans eschewed the glories of a picture-perfect April day and sardined themselves into Capital One Arena to say goodbye on Sunday. All throughout the final home game of the Capitals’ regular season, the sea of red chanted “ONE MORE YEAR” and “OVI, OVI” and roared themselves hoarse each time he touched the puck.
Towels featuring two decades’ worth of Ovechkin pictures and the phrase “Gr8ness” were draped on every seat. Multiple retrospective highlight reels were shown, including one covering Ovechkin’s storied relationship with fellow future Hall of Famer Sidney Crosby. Capitals center Dylan Strome purposefully got himself booted from the opening faceoff so Ovechkin and Crosby could square off.
Everybody under the roof was treating the afternoon like a well-earned goodbye.
Everybody, that is, except Ovechkin.
“I haven’t decided yet,” he said dryly about his impending decision, when asked why he declined Pittsburgh’s handshake line.
That’s Ovechkin’s right. He has earned as much and more. But that approach meant his potential final home game existed in a bizarre in-between. Opponents, teammates, fans and coaches wanted to celebrate the accomplishments of a sporting legend. They showered him with love and praise. Ovechkin, though, wanted little part of the party. He did not lace ‘em up on Sunday to bask in the adoration. In his mind, he’s still just another player, searching for two points, trying to keep Washington’s slim playoff hopes alive.
Fans, media, the adoring public, those on the outside, we want our sports narratives in neat, tidy boxes. We want farewell tours. Hollywood final hurrahs. Heart-tugging send-offs. Cheer-able heroes and boo-able villains. Clean, easy, digestible narratives. We want to know ahead of time how we’re going to feel.
But the real world is usually more complicated.
In the case of Ovechkin, that means everyone involved — those close to him and those in the nosebleeds — has been forced to thread a delicate needle, honoring him without disrespecting him.
“All these things are important to do,” Caps head coach Spencer Carbery said after his team’s 3-0 win. “Because if it is the end, we need to have been able to say goodbye and appreciate it. But he also looks at it like: ‘I haven’t decided yet.’
“That’s been, honestly, really, really challenging.”
Age be damned, Ovechkin still moves through life with a juvenile jubilance. He has sustained the eager, playful spirit with which he entered our sporting consciousness more than two decades ago. Before Sunday’s game, he spent at least a half-hour playing soccer keepie-uppie with his teammates in the bowels of the arena. At one point, he resorted to a game of rock-paper-scissors to keep his place in the circle.
But while he remains youthful, Ovechkin is no longer young. His body — battered and blasted by 21 years of crunching hits, slashing sticks, deflected pucks, heavy falls, late nights and long flights — must ache and rattle and rage. It has to, no matter how much he grits his teeth.
Early in his career, Ovechkin, asked how he felt after taking a puck to the ankle, famously proclaimed: “Russian machine never breaks.”
That statement proved prescient. It turned into a rallying cry, a mantra, a mission statement, a website, a championship. Ovechkin never broke, missing fewer than 60 games due to injury across his 21-year career. But Father Time, that cruel, cruel beast, spares no man. And so, it has become impossible to ignore that the machine called Alexander Ovechkin is running more slowly than it once did.
Because while the future Hall of Famer continues to be a productive scorer — he leads Washington with 32 goals this season — the rest of his game has dwindled alongside his athleticism. Ovechkin was always a magnificently powerful skater, a Ferrari with world-class handling and acceleration. Just 45 seconds into his first NHL game, he checked a Columbus Blue Jacket into the endboards with such force that a metal beam holding the glass in place came clattering to the ice.
Now he lumbers, calculatingly opportunistic, expending energy only when he absolutely needs to. Ovechkin spends most of his time lurking in the offensive zone, like a wily crocodile, until a worthwhile chance arises. He’ll dole out a hit or two but is generally a negative in front of his own net; he is the only player in the NHL who rarely starts possessions in the defensive zone. That puts Ovechkin somewhere between limited and liability. Uncomfortable as it might be to admit, next year’s Capitals — stacked to the gills with dynamic, young talent and thirsty for the cap space Ovechkin’s contract swallows up — might be a better team without him.
But while Ovechkin is no longer what he once was, he is still something and, in a way, something more. A return in 2026-27 would mean a full-blown farewell tour. Gifts in every city. Sold-out arenas. Photo opportunities. A season revolving around commemoration. All of it a massive moneymaker for the Capitals. But Ovechkin might not want or care about that. His record-breaking goal chase last spring probably scratched that itch.
Wayne Gretzky, the Great One, officially announced his retirement two days before the final game of the 1998-99 season. That allowed for a day of total celebration, coincidentally also a Sunday afternoon against the Pittsburgh Penguins. Gretzky wept. So did the sport. And then, as all games do with their heroes and haters and nobodys and icons, it moved on. Hockey continued, barrelling forward.
Soon it will do the same with Ovechkin, even if his farewell isn’t as storybook.
There was a time, earlier in his career, when this man needed hockey and hockey needed him. That has changed. Ovechkin is a mellower character now, a married man and the father of two. Long ago, with the Russian’s help, hockey lifted itself out of a post-lockout lurch and passed the torch to the next generation — to the McDavids, the Hugheses and the Celebrinis.
Ovechkin and the sport will survive, and even thrive, without each other. They already have been.
All that’s left for Ovechkin to do is go home.
