Come meet Bruce Dowbiggin, co-author of Deal With It: The Trades That Shocked The NHL & Changed Hockey. Get your copy autographed, talk hockey. In Calgary Saturday Sept. 28 at Shawville Indigo 11-4. On Saturday Oct. 12 Signal Hill Indigo 11-4. Appearances coming in Fredericton late October and Toronto in early November. Let’s do this thing!

With the grinding war in Ukraine showing no signs of ceasing and Biden-led sanctions doing nothing tangible to deter Vladimir Putin, Russia’s image in the West has rarely been so low. Both sides in the U.S. election accuse each other of being Putin’s stooges, signifying his toxic status. So now might be a good time to ask if the NHL is prepared for a Russian to become the greatest goal scorer in league history.

As the league prepares to start another season on October 4, the top pick in the 2004 Draft is showing every sign that he could pass the game’s greatest in goal scoring. Going into 2024-25, the 39-year-old Capitals star Alex Ovechkin has left the immortal Gordie Howe in the dust. He’s now just 41 scores back of Wayne Gretzky, the Prometheus of NHL scoring. He’s recently broken Gretzky’s record for the most 40-goal seasons in the process. Given health it won’t  be the last Gretzky mark eclipsed by Ovie.

1. Wayne Gretzky.   894

2. Alex Ovechkin 853

3. Gordie Howe 801

For his career, the Capitals captain is averaging 0.60 goals per game, meaning at that rate, he could pass Gretzky this season, a pace that Ovechkin is very familiar with. It’s not a given. He scored just eight goals in his first 43 games of 2023-24, but came back strong in the second half of the season to put up a total of 31 for the year, which was the lowest goal-scoring total in an 82-game season.

Hampering him as well might be the ineptitude of the Caps who missed the postseason the past two seasons and who now have few alternatives to draw the defensive concentration away from Ovechkin.

And then there is good health. He’s never played fewer than 68 games in a full regular season. But Ovechkin said he tweaked something mid-training this past summer. He assured the Caps it’s nothing major. “You just have to be smart, and we talk about it with our trainers and the coaching staff. I went there just to see how I feel and feel nice out there,” Ovechkin said after the Caps first practice.

Even in a time of peace this would be interesting to see the public reaction in Canada and the U.S. to a Russian passing Canada’s GOAT No. 99. While the No.1 pick in 2005, Sidney Crosby, has had a squeaky clean image, the Great Eight has been a little salty for some folks. He plays a game Howe would love, dispensing devastating hits as well as brilliant goals. His gap-toothed sneer has not always endeared him to many.

Nor, as we noted in July of 2022, has his proximity to Vladimir Putin himself. In November 2017, Ovechkin started a movement called PutinTeam in support of Putin during the 2018 Russian presidential election. In the past he’s sought to have a foot in both camps. “I don’t know what’s happening out there,” he said in 2022. “I know it’s a hard situation, but it is what it is. You know, I play here, and this is my second home. I don’t want to fight between two countries, because it’s going to be a mess.”

Too late on that front, Alex. Putin’s naked aggression and Biden’s clumsy inability to unseat him (he’s endorsed assassination) have left the West on the brink of a war with nuclear potential. Legendary Czech goalie Dominik Hasek thinks Ovechkin should not be allowed to play in the NHL, and that Russian players be banned. “The NHL should, and could make a decision,” Hasek told reporters. “It’s not only about [NHL Commissioner] Gary Bettman. There are 31 owners of NHL teams, and I think that those people are the most responsible. They can sit in their room, and they can vote and make a decision, but they do not want to make that decision.”

With perhaps a million dead so far and no settlement in sight, few can say where the conflict is headed. Except that it’s highly unlikely the West will be surrendering its sons to the battlefield when NATO runs out of Ukrainians willing to die.

One thing about Ovechkin is certain. As we pointed out in our 2022 book Inexact Science: the Six Most Compelling Drafts in NHL History, Ovechkin put paid to the bias against Russians at the top of the NHL draft. While there had been Russian Hall of Fame selections in the middle to lower rounds of the draft (Sergei Fedorov, Pavel Bure, Sergei Zubov) Ovechkin’s No. 1 overall was considered a risk at the time. He changed the equation.

“It began in 2004, when the Capitals selected Russian phenom Alex Ovechkin, maybe the greatest pure goal scorer the NHL has seen. A number one pick who has lived up to the billing of “generational player,” Ovechkin maybe would have been even more widely hailed as that “Next One” had he developed under the intense hockey media spotlight of Canada, or North America in general.

Never before had an international player earned the kind of accolades Ovechkin received leading up to his draft year. After all, he was only the second Russian ever to go that high on draft day. But the fact he wasn’t a Canadian kid may have tempered the headlines around “Ovie” and made some fans skeptical about his supposed wizardry. 

He wasn’t helped by how easily a stacked Team Canada had handled him and his Russians in the World Juniors of 2004 and 2005. In retrospect, “The Great 8” was actually undersold as a generational legend. But all of this made his majestic rookie season as a 20-year-old in 2005–06 more of a revelation than it would have been otherwise.

CAA agent J.P. Barry says that some resistance remains. “Even with Russian players, we’ve seen a hesitance in the past. A few teams have said to me, “Sorry, we just don’t draft Russians. End of story.” I know of several teams that did make that an internal memo. Some even said, “We can’t take a Euro in the first three rounds!” I don’t think there’s any team that could say any of that anymore, though. Way back when, however, there were these unwritten internal policies that were just silly. 

There was definitely a period there where teams didn’t want to touch Russians, because they didn’t feel that they could get them to come over. Sometimes they were teams impacted by something negative that happened in the past and let it change their course of action.”

If Ovechkin didn’t entirely smash the Russian stereotype then his countryman Evgeni Malkin, selected right behind Ovechkin in the 2004 draft, sealed the deal. (Ironically the two were rivals for a long time, only reconciling in recent years). Lifetime, Malkin has 444 goals and 702 assists in an injury-riddled career.

To the NHL’s credit, it hasn’t banned or sanctioned its Russian stars as some have done. The country’s teams are banned from international soccer and hockey tournaments and the Paralympics. Russian tennis players Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev (the top-2 ranked Russian male players) were barred from participating at the 2022 Wimbledon. Many Russian artists have seen their concerts cancelled.

For now Ovechkin is walking a tight rope. He’s called for peace without mentioning Russia or Ukraine directly. In May 2022, he reiterated his support for Putin, as well as retaining the Russian president on his Instagram profile photo. Much depends on the progress of the war, and how much Canada and the U.S. are drawn into the combat.

The best advice is probably to keep his head down and his politics to himself if he wants to be celebrated for passing Gretzky.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.