Alex Ovechkin is about to get a twelve-month farewell tour, and the sport has already decided to spend it staring at the ice and nowhere else. That's the con being run on you. You cannot hand this man a victory lap and pretend the thing he did three weeks before he announced it never happened.
Start with the part nobody fights about. Ovechkin is the greatest goal-scorer the game has produced. He passed Wayne Gretzky on April 6, 2025, scoring his 895th against the New York Islanders to take a record most people assumed would outlive all of us. Entering his final season he has 929 goals, every one of them in a Washington sweater. Those numbers are clean, but they're the easy part. The real argument comes next.
The argument is whether you can throw a party for the player while refusing to look at the man. My answer is no, and the people who forced that choice onto everyone else are Ovechkin and the organization that has spent years treating his politics as somebody else's headache.
Here is what happened just before the applause started. Ovechkin appeared in a campaign advertisement for Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, published in the pro-Kremlin newspaper Vedomosti ahead of Russia's parliamentary elections, under the slogan "when we are united, we are invincible." He stood in a group behind Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, next to figures including Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of state network RT. When he was asked whether he'd hesitated, he said "No." He added, "I'm Russian and I support my country... I hope everybody understands that everybody wants peace." He confirmed he was the man standing behind Lavrov, said he was asked to take part, and said he agreed without a second thought.
So spare me the translation-error defense. He knew exactly what he was doing in front of that camera.
It's part of a pattern, too. Ovechkin launched a movement called PutinTeam in 2017. For years his Instagram profile picture was a photo of himself with Putin. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and he was asked if he still backed the man, he said, "Well, he's my president," then, "I am Russian, right?" and "I am not in politics. I am an athlete." That last line is the whole trick. You don't accidentally found a movement with the president's name on it. You don't accidentally film a party ad behind the foreign minister. He's told us for years that none of this is political while doing the most political things a Russian public figure can do.
The Capitals and the NHL have let him have it both ways the entire time, because the alternative costs money. "He's Russian, it's complicated" is a comfortable answer. It lets the league sell the chase, the record, and now the goodbye without ever asking the player a question he doesn't want to answer.
U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson wrote to Commissioner Gary Bettman calling it "incredibly alarming" that Ovechkin had publicly supported "the party of war criminal Putin," and asked the league to review its policies. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which represents roughly 1.3 million Canadians, called for him to be sanctioned and barred from Canada, labeling him "a disgusting supporter of Russia's genocidal war against Ukraine." Latvia has banned him from the country indefinitely. And from inside the game, Hall of Fame goaltender Dominik Hasek wrote that "everyone in this photograph has chosen to officially support Russia's imperialist war in Ukraine," adding that "because of each of them, many Ukrainians and Russians will be killed."
Some will wave all this off by saying Ovechkin stopped mattering on the ice a while ago, so who cares how he leaves. The less he does on the ice, the more this farewell becomes a tribute to the man himself, nothing else. His final season opens at home against the Penguins at Capital One Arena on Wednesday, Oct. 7, and the building will roar.
Let it. The roar doesn't settle the question. Ovechkin had the chance to say nothing, and instead he said "No, I didn't hesitate." Believe him.
