All these years later, even though you know what’s coming, it’s still stunning, still a miraculous and magnificent moment in hockey history: a 20-year-old rookie by the name of Alexander Ovechkin, sliding on his back, facing away from the goal, reaching overhead with his stick, hooking the puck, flicking a backhand goal into the net against the Phoenix Coyotes … right there in front of none other than Wayne Gretzky. It wasn’t the most crucial goal ever scored, given that it happened on a Monday afternoon in a January 2006 match between two mediocre teams, but it might just be the most cinematic … and for what it heralded, maybe the most significant, too.
As Ovechkin nears Gretzky’s all-time goal scoring record — he’s seven away from breaking the record The Great One’s held since 1994 — it’s worth looking back at one of the earliest times the two crossed paths, a moment that defined Ovechkin as a player for the ages, even as a rookie.
“God, it was one of the most amazing goals I’ve ever seen. Amazing,” Darren Pang, then a color commentator for the Coyotes, recalled to Yahoo Sports. “Three guys probably thought the play was dead, and one guy didn’t, and he ends up scoring one of the greatest-looking goals in history.”
The Great Eight’s arrival
A tall, muscled Russian with a vicious shot and a taste for collision, Ovechkin arrived in the NHL at a precipitous time for the entire sport. The league was coming off the 2004-05 lockout, the first time a major American sport had canceled an entire season. Years of grinding, defense-first hockey had driven down both scoring and fan interest.
But Ovechkin and fellow incoming rookie Sidney Crosby of Pittsburgh rode a new wave of interest and hope into the season. Selected first overall by the Caps in the 2004 draft, Ovechkin opted to keep playing pro hockey in Russia during the lockout. That only bolstered the secondhand hype for Ovechkin, since few Americans had actually laid eyes on him. What they knew was that he was something talented, something new, and for the first post-lockout season, that was enough.
“I don’t think people really knew who he was, whereas Crosby, you knew who he was from the time he was 13,” recalls Jeff Halpern, then the Washington Capitals’ captain. “There was a huge buzz of Crosby coming in, and Ovi was this really good player from Russia, and that was…