No. 255: ALEXANDER OVECHKIN / When the greatest goal-scorer in hockey history made his North American debut, an unknown playing in front of a couple of hundred folks getting out of the Prairie cold.
There's an inexplicable satisfaction in seeing a star before they're tagged as the Next Big Thing.
As of this writing Alexander Ovechkin is just 22 goals away from breaking Wayne Gretzky’s career goal-scoring record. His 20th of the season, a last-minute empty-net job in a Washington win over Nashville, might not have been aesthetically pleasing but in its own way remarkable—he’s already scored 20 goals despite missing more than a month with a fractured left fibula. When he scored at a career-low rate last year (31 in 79 games), it seemed to suggest that he might struggle to get 99’s record, that he couldn’t do it in a single season, that he might be fading. Well, he might not get there this year, but that would be down to those games lost to injury—he thoroughly erased any doubt that he’ll get there
The NHL powers will find it awkward when Ovechkin does take down the record, what with Russia being a pariah state because of its invasion of Ukraine and Ovie’s history of cozying up to Vladimir Putin, but that’s a subject for down the line.
Alexander Ovechkin’s name first popped up in North American media back in June of 2002 in a feature I wrote about agents recruiting Russian hockey prospects. (Source: a search of the Canadian Newstream database and newspapers.com.) That was two months after I saw him play for the first time … but let’s not get ahead here.
True to form, my story in June 2002 ran across three full broadsheet pages. I’m all about brevity—your brevity.
At the top of this week, I’m offering up a couple of pieces about Ovechkin’s origin story I’ll begin today with a little essay and book excerpt about the first time I heard his name.
I’M not the only one who takes immense satisfaction and exercises bragging rights about seeing someone before they make it big. There is a psychic draw, a sense of insiderdom, My friends have listened to me preface a story with a line like, “They’re famous now, but I saw them then.” Yeah, their eyes roll, just like yours do reading this. Those who feel the need to remind you that they were first in the door are insufferable. So am I, but at least I’m self-aware.
So yeah, those who know me will check the time and remember an appointment that they’re late when I mention how I saw the Police at the Edge in the spring of ’79 with a crowd of, oh, maybe 200, and down the line, platinum records later, they’d play in stadiums in front of 80,000 when they were known and celebrated as “the biggest band on the world.” I feel a pang of envy for those who saw the band a couple of months before that in Toronto at the Horseshoe when their just released first album was tanking, roundly trashed by critics, and regulars at the ‘Shoe were annoyed by these noisy nobodies, but still I felt like I was one of the first in.
No such envy with the B-52s—never as big as the Police, though more enduring, not remotely as self-serious and a lot more likeable that Sting, Summers & Copeland. One day—memory tells me it was an afternoon gig—we went to the Edge to see Fred & friends before the release of their first album and knowing nothing about them other than the fact that they were from Athens, Georgia. They drew, oh, maybe 50 people if I’m being generous. Musicians just walked up on stage without introductions or fanfare and broke into song—I told my buddy Gus that I liked the band. Three songs in the bandleader let us in on the fact that he and his buddies were the unadvertised opening act, Everglades, a surf-pop band out of the Ontario College of Art we’d learn). A few songs later the B-52a came out and with our table right beside the stage we heard early versions of songs they’d play thousands of times over, instantly recognizable to anyone with even minute interest in the music of the era, Rock Lobster, Planet Claire and others. When their first album finally came out, I was hugely disappointed that my favourite number from that show wasn’t included: Private Idaho. That was a case of seeing an act in its infancy.
The same dynamic applies for sports with me—the idea of seeing The Next Big Things before anyone even has a sense that The Next Big Things are in the pipeline. I knew they were coming when I saw them before anyone knew places you ahead of the curve and stakes a bullet-proof claim of prescience. I’m not talking about seeing Michael Jordan as a freshman at UNC, but rather at high-school senior in Wilmington.
Two hockey players have placed their personal stamps on the game over the last two decades—yeah, hard to imagine but Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin have been around that long. In fact, slightly longer than that: Fans of the sport first heard Crosby’s name in the fall of 2003, when he was a 16-year-old tearing up the Quebec league with l'Océanic de Rimouski and caught a glimpse of him that December when he skated with the Canadian team at the world juniors in Helsinki; by then, Ovechkin’s name and image was already out there, fans having their first eyeful of him the previous winter when he led Russia to gold at the world juniors in Halifax. Sid would get his first good look at his future rival and nemesis at the same time.1
I had Police/B-52 experiences with both Crosby and Ovechkin. I saw both when their names wouldn’t have registered with 99 percent of fans—scouts and such insiders, yeah, they’d have known, ditto folks in arenas in Halifax and fans of Moscow Dynamo, but anyone otherwise would have been in the dark.
On this SubStack last year I wrote about seeing the former play in the summer under-18s in 2003 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, i.e. before he attended training camp in Rimouski. Check out the story linked here, No. 170: SIDNEY CROSBY / Before the famous victories that everyone watched, the brutally tough loss that no saw. In its wake, Hockey Canada was as cold as a mother-in-law's love. (You’ll need at least a trial paid subscription to access this one, which might be worth a read before the NHL’s Four Nations tournament, although “tournament” might be raising expectations too high.)
With Ovie, I saw him at the IIHF world under-18s in Slovakia in April of 2002. I was on a bit of a medical leave from the Ottawa Citizen—a wisdom tooth extraction went awry, the surgeon’s note only hinting at the pain—and the tournament was in the spa town of Piestany. According to NHL heading there, the spring waters were reputed to be an almost mystical curative and out of sympathy they vouched for me getting the league rate at their hotel—yes, the stars lined up for once. On the way over, a Bruins scout named Bob Tindall gave me a run-down on the prospects at the event, most of them eligible for the 2002 draft, some for 2003. He also told me the most interesting kid was a Russian kid—I got a stereophonic earful about Ovechkin.
“He’s just 16, a late birthday, so he’s not eligible until 2004, but if the draft were held today, anyone who’s seen him would tell you he’d go No.1 in the 2002 draft, hands down, easy call,” Bob told me.
“You’ve seen a lot of him,” I said, hazarding a guess, off the mark of course.
“Two games at the under-17s in Manitoba a few months back, but that was enough,” said Bob, who died a couple of years back at the age of 86. “It’s not like I’ve got a secret. Not many of have seen him, but they will pretty soon.”
What I saw at the tournament in Piestany (what passes for my Police at the Edge), well, I’ll touch on tomorrow. To properly set the table, I went to the vault and dug out an excerpt from the Ovechkin biography that I co-wrote with Damien Cox back in 2010. Damien and I split up writing and research mostly section by section and Ovie’s formative years and particularly the under-17s and under-18s fell in my folder.
Here’s the excerpt. Stay tuned for more Ovechkin content this week.
Alexander Ovechkin’s conquest of North America began just after New Year’s Day, 2001, in the steel-towns of Selkirk and Stonewall, Manitoba, a 40-minute drive north and east of Winnipeg. If it wasn’t quite the middle of nowhere, it was a long way from the hockey mainstream—the nearest NHL team was almost 400 miles away in Minneapolis, even the nearest major junior team was over 100 miles away in Brandon. The international sports media didn’t descend on the event—the under-17 World Cup isn't on their calendar. But that’s not to say that Ovechkin escaped notice. Those who braved the frigid temperatures to get to the arenas left shaking their heads after games. That included scouts who filed breathless reports back to their NHL teams—the people who could first have any impact on his career went home thinking: Who was that No. 8 on Russia and how the Hell do we get him?
The under-17 World Cup isn’t officially a world event. The tournament isn’t sanctioned by the International Ice Hockey Federation. It’s a creation of Hockey Canada with the objective of developing the country’s regional talent through elite competition. For almost all the teenagers in this tournament, the under-17 tournament is a significant step up in class. A faster game than they’ve ever seen. Stakes higher than anything they’ve ever played for.
Fans filled the 3,000-seat Selkirk Arena for games played by the host Canada West teams and the neighboring Canada Pacific and Ontario teams but only a couple of hundred made it out for Russia’s first game of the tournament, a contest against the Finns. Thus, Ovechkin’s international debut took place in virtual obscurity. No video, no photo, no program. His was just another name on the officials’ game sheet. It was even misspelled: Alexandre Overchrine. If those in attendance didn’t quite know his name, he gave them a clear idea of things to come.
Russia won 9-6, Ovechkin potted four goals and scouts went to their thesauruses for superlatives. One scout for a team in the NHL’s Western Conference filed this scouting report: “Passionate … unbelievable speed and strength … could use his line-mates … four goals and could have had more.”
If few saw the game in Selkirk, even fewer made it out the following day to the game between Ontario and Russia in the 400-seat Stonewall Arena. The Ontario squad featured a bunch of future NHL stars, including Mike Richards and Jeff Carter of the Philadelphia Flyers, Nathan Horton of the Florida Panthers and Corey Perry of the Anaheim Ducks.
The same scout who filed a report from the Finland game stood behind the glass at ice level at one end of the rink. The rhapsody continued though, as he admits now, he strained for words. “Like a wild stallion … just a great game … looks to score and shoots a ton … definitely passionate.” In retrospect the scout thinks that his files from the tournament might have been taken with a grain of salt by the executives back at the office. “I wish I could have put it all in bold type or something, just to let them know that I hadn’t gone soft and was exaggerating,” he says.
Despite two more goals from Ovechkin, the Russian teenagers lost the game 6-3 and their chances of advancing to the medal round grew slim. They grew slimmer, even after a one-sided 11-2 victory over out-manned Team Atlantic.[U14]
Ovechkin scored five goals against the Maritime squad and they came in almost every fashion imaginable—power play, shorthanded, unassisted, breakaway. Scouts figured that he could have easily had a couple more. So did those on the other team. “We had heard about what he had done in the other game but we hadn’t seen him,” says Stephen Dixon, only one of four major junior players on the Atlantic roster. “He was just so much bigger and stronger and he had amazing skill. Our guys had never been in against a player like that. It was an eye-opener.”
Ovechkin’s game might have been aesthetically pleasing but it was marred by players on both sides acting out. Two hundred minutes in penalties were doled out, including majors for spearing and elbowing. Match penalties made a couple of players unavailable for Russia’s final game in the opening round and others were banged up.
Predictably, Team Pacific, the strongest Canadian squad, shut out the weary Russians 5-0 and sent them home without a medal. Not that it mattered so much to the scouts and agents in attendence. Ovechkin scored 11 goals in four games to lead the tournament—the second leading scorer, Nathan Horton, had five goals in six games.
Dallas Stars scout Jimmy Johnston called Ovechkin’s performance “one of the two most dominating” he had seen in more than a dozen under-17 tournaments. He said the only player who could be mentioned in the same breath as Ovechkin was Ilya Kovalchuk, who led Russia to the gold medal at the under-17s in 2000.
“Kovalchuk had great skating, probably better than Ovechkin at that point,” Johnston says. Both had enough skill that they could take over a game pretty much at will. What separated Ovechkin, though, was the physical component. He was a man among boys and he beat up anyone who skated in his way. Kovalchuk was a 'cool' player, controlled, where Ovechkin had fire. He rolled over guys in a way that you just don't see European players do very often. In that way he was closer to the Canadian and American kids--he was a pure power forward. The other thing, though, is that he had a good sense of the game--not in a creative way, a play-making way. But it looked like he knew where to go and exactly when to get there. There was nothing over-anxious ... nothing forced. He didn't pick his spots--he didn't have to--but still you could see that he had hockey sense.”
NHL scouts are loath to make snap decisions or read too much into a couple of games or one tournament. They pride themselves on their skepticism. Johnston was comfortable making an exception after the under-17s. With a late September birthday, Ovechkin wasn’t eligible for the 2003 NHL entry draft. He was going to have to wait until the following year. Johnston thought Ovechkin was the closest thing to a sure bet in scouting. “I'd have had him first pick in 2003 if he were eligible, maybe overall even No. 1 in 2002 as a 16-year-old,” Johnston says. “It was just a week and the Russians only won two of their four games but Ovechkin made a pretty strong case that he was the best prospect not in the NHL."
That was the unanimous opinion among the NHL scouts who saw Ovechkin at the under-17s. It was going to become league-wide consensus by the spring. By then they would get his name right.
Yeah, I’ve screened video of the 2003 under-20s tournament online to see if I can spot Kid Crosby around the bench or in any shots in the crowd. At the time he was 15 and back in his hometown Cole Harbour from Shattuck-St Mary’s for Christmas and New Years. Hockey Canada already had Sid on its radar and wanted him to get a taste of the day-to-day, so he had all-access behind the scenes for the duration in Halifax.