COMMITTING A CAPITAL OFFENCE
Ovechkin insists on going to Olympics
Since they were on the road at the time, Alex Ovechkin and his teammates missed out on attending the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., over the weekend.
No matter. On Tuesday morning, they were part of their own three-ring — or, this being an Olympic issue, five-ring — sideshow, courtesy of the NHL’s supposed decision a day earlier not to attend the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea.
Ovechkin, you see, is the ringleader of those players who still plan on attending the Games, NHL be damned — at least that’s how his colleagues see him.
And so, on this soggy Toronto spring day, with the hallway outside the Capitals’ dressing room at the Air Canada Centre so clogged with cameras and microphones that there was no room to move, The Great Eight looked at the media circus in front of him, flashed his trademark all-this-for-me? sarcastic smile, then did what Alex Ovechkin always does. He refused to back down.
For months, Ovechkin has said he planned on going to Pyeong-Chang no matter what the league decided. The NHL made its choice Monday. Ovechkin made his a long time ago.
“I haven’t changed my mind and I won’t,” he said with a quiet confidence. Why? “It’s my country,” he said, playing the Russian patriotism card. “I think everybody wants to play there. It’s the biggest opportunity in your life to play in the Olympic Games. So, I don’t know, somebody going to tell me don’t go, I don’t care, I just go.”
Standing at the back of the media pack listening to Ovechkin’s words were a couple of executives with the National Hockey League Players’ Association. While they wouldn’t admit it publicly, they had to like what they were hearing. Less than 24 hours earlier, the union released a statement ripping the league for pulling out of the upcoming Winter Games.
The question is: How official is the NHL’s official closing of the books on this issue?
The league claims it is moving ahead with its plans for its 201718 schedule, minus an Olympic break, but we’ve yet to see the schedule. Neither has Ovechkin, who remains cautiously optimistic a deal between the NHL and the International Olympic Committee can be struck.
“I hope so,” Ovechkin said. “There’s still a long time to make a decision. You can say whatever, but the next year’s schedule is not out there yet … but in my mind, I’m going. It doesn’t matter what.”
To Ovechkin’s point that all might not be lost: In an interview with the website Inside The Games, International Ice Hockey Federation secretary general Horst Lichtner said the two sides “are still in discussions.”
“Gary (Bettman) said on the phone, our playoffs are starting this weekend and we want them to concentrate on the sport, so they said let’s put an end to this whole thing. … But he also said that if there was anything substantial changing now, with that statement, he is ready to discuss. If we have some movement from all the sides, we could still do it,” Lichtner said.
Ovechkin plans on doing it either way, and he has the backing of Caps owner Ted Leonsis, who told Postmedia in December that “he’s like family. He’s done a lot for our team and I support him if that’s what he chooses to do.”
For its part, the league sent out memos to team executives to keep mum about players who say they will go.
One of those could very well be the Caps’ Evgeny Kuznetsov, who placed his hand on his chest when asked if he would follow in Ovechkin’s footsteps.
“If Russia needs us, of course,” Kuznetsov said, still emotional from the terrorist attacks in St. Petersburg on Monday.
But it might not be so simple. In a tweet, Igor Eronko, a hockey writer for the Russian newspaper Sport-Express, said a Russian hockey official told him Ovechkin’s willingness to go to Pyeong-Chang “won’t be enough to join Team Russia. NHL has to agree to that.”
For Caps centre Nicklas Backstrom, the situation is frustrating to say the least. After being forced to sit out Sweden’s goldmedal game against Canada at the 2014 Games in Sochi when he failed a drug test because of his sinus medication, South Korea would have been a chance for retribution.
Asked about the Sochi incident, Backstrom — who remained noncommittal about the 2018 Games — replied: “That was not a fun situation.”
Neither is this.