One thousand and one pucks

He's tired, but he's not going to leave. He is Alexander Ovechkin

In fact, Alexander Ovechkin needs not one, but 17 goals in order to close all the major overseas sniper records, this time in the “regular season plus playoffs” format. The thousand that he just reached is a beautiful and amazing number, but in North America they don’t count goals that way, there flies and cutlets separately, and accordingly, without any fuss, they take note that there is such a total figure. But our admirers of Alexander the Great’s talent need these pucks even more than he himself. And if he still wants to say “that’s it, I’m leaving” today, they will try to convince him that it’s too early to retire.

Really, we worry about the immediate future of the most famous active hockey player in the world as if we were a close relative. So, as if the fate of each fan directly depends on Alexander Mikhailovich’s decision to continue or end his career. Well, fate is not fate, but something serious really depends - for five or six years, no less, a huge number of people have been watching every change on an imaginary scoreboard, on which it is no longer the score of the Washington game, but the number of pucks scored by the forward. This is not even a habit, but a ritual, in some way reconciling with the ugliness of today's world. At the peak moments of “sheep mania,” the voices of politicians and officials, including sports officials, are woven into the large chorus of admirers - how could we be without them, they also want to be with the people, they also want to give praise to those who help them feel like the coolest.

For example, the “All-Russian ski mother”, three-time Olympic champion Elena Vyalbe, reacted exactly this way to the forward’s latest achievement: “I’m glad and proud that we have such a compatriot who proves to the whole world that Russians are the coolest.” And Sergei Sushko, general director of Dynamo Moscow, who can’t wait to host his pupil, especially noted that

“Ovechkin is the Russian ambassador. Even the President of the United States notes him in his interviews and follows his achievements.”

The singers don’t realize that a 40-year-old gray-haired man, fairly exhausted from great sport, has not fluttered for a long time and overcomes himself every time he goes out on the ice. It’s hard for Ovechkin, and it’s obvious, he’s been going through the motions all this season - sometimes empty, sometimes thick, he still scores, habitually crashes into his opponents, lifts his teammates out of the trenches, still rejoices at every goal he scores, but it feels like a lot is given to him through strength, and somewhere, probably, through pain. This is not the fatigue of the moment, not the consequences of a specific injury, it is the burden of years that, like a backpack, cannot be thrown off. He already did the impossible - after thirty he scored almost as many goals as before, in his younger and most productive years. Experienced fans know that in the golden Soviet times, by the age of thirty, everything was squeezed out of a hockey player; for most of them, their playing career ended, but for him it seemed to be starting again, and there was no one who would shout: “Retire!”

So he doesn’t want people to shout or even think like that. What cannot be taken away is that the brutal striker has a reverent attitude towards the game, and

Ovechkin has said more than once that he does not want to be a burden to hockey, but will leave when the game stops bringing joy. The game, not the numbers, because being the personification of the pursuit of even an impressive number is not the most pleasant role; there are more important roles.

He already made history long ago last April, surpassing the great Wayne Gretzky in the number of goals in the regular championship - at the “895” mark, he secured the title of the best NHL sniper of all time.

1000 is a nice number, but not a record; Wayne Gretzky has 16 more due to more goals in the Stanley Cup. So what will change if Alexander Mikhailovich surpasses this record number two? Yes, nothing, in fact, will change, and in this case, what is important is the price that will have to be paid - in a figurative, of course, sense. Until the end of the regular season - nothing at all, about a dozen matches, Washington’s chances of getting into the playoffs are almost mathematical, that is, scanty, there is no chance at all that their opponents will give the green light to the capital. There is an option that the team will help the captain with collecting statistics, but Ovechkin himself did not want to shoot into the empty goal at key moments, when the opponent changed the goalkeeper to a field player in the last minutes; he was not in a position to make history with such goals.

This was the case now: in the match with Ottawa, in which Ovechkin broke his seven-game scoring silence and reached the 999 mark, defenseman Cole Hutson threw his first puck into an empty net, although he could have trusted the captain to do it. He scored himself, and did the right thing, transferring the historic assist to Ovechkin to the next game with the season leader Colorado. In the end, Washington was losing 1:2, had a power play, and the captain was taken out for a shot from his “office,” that is, from the left throw-in circle. Nothing supernatural, this was repeated many times - Ovechkin fired on the move, and the puck flew into the goal at a speed of 150.8 km per hour, hitting Mackenzie Blackwood. It turned out as according to the script, in the classic version, which everyone noted, as well as the fact that one of the assistants was Hutson, who was born after Alexander Ovechkin made his debut for Washington.

We made more noise about Ovechkin’s thousand than in North America, as well as discussions on the topic “to continue or end.” Summarizing the opinions,

the Russian hockey community is inclined to believe that it is better for Alexander Mikhailovich to extend his contract for another year with the guarantee that he will definitely reach the rest of the pucks to the record,

and in parallel, on his farewell multi-month tour during the regular season, Ovechkin, the club, and the National Hockey League will earn money. Everyone wins: Alexander Ovechkin will finally reign on the goal-scoring throne for years and decades to come, parting with the playing career of the great sniper will not be crumpled, the club will still inevitably enter the “post-Ovechkin” era with total changes, one season will still not solve anything, even if it is so transitional. The last regular season, which the Capitals, to the surprise of the hockey community, finished in second place, was rather an anomaly.

Experts of all stripes and ranks are of little interest in what thoughts Washington and the defendant himself have on the continuation of the banquet. I understand them - well, I don’t want to part with Ovechkin, a player with whom I have almost become close for more than twenty years. After all, no one has aroused and is arousing such interest in all the years of the “open world” as this very Sanya the sniper - neither the first greats in the NHL Makarov and Larionov, nor Mogilny and Fedorov who appeared there even earlier, nor representatives of the new wave Datsyuk and Kovalchuk, nor the current leaders and in their own way phenomenal Kucherov and Kaprizov, even Malkin cannot stand comparison, despite the fact that Evgeniy is undoubtedly a world-class star, our best center forward of modern times and a much more titled hockey player than record holder Ovechkin.

The phenomenon of Ovechkin is that he has one, but fiery passion - to score goals; nature created him this way, finding in him the ideal embodiment of this very passion.

A thousand goals is another evidence of this, and if you dig deeper, then why not count the goals for the Russian national team and for his native Dynamo, taking into account which the number of Ovechkin’s goals has already exceeded 1,100? Gretzky, taking into account goals for the Canadian national team, has four goals less, and Jaromir Jagr, taking into account all goals at the highest level, has four goals more. Everything is achievable.

He has long been a legend and has earned the right to any decision. Everything else is statistics.