Star left wing alters play, starts to produce more A pair of devastating losses changed the arc of Alex Ovechkin’s career, and the question has been asked repeatedly ever since: What happened to the old Ovechkin?
The 26-year-old left wing has won two Hart Trophies as the NHL’s MVP and led the thrill-a-minute Capitals to the best record in the league in 2009-10. But his Russian hockey team failed spectacularly at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, losing to Canada in an embarrassing 7-3 rout in the quarterfinals. A little more than two months later, the Caps, expected to make a run at a Stanley Cup, instead were stunned by the eighth-seeded Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs.
Even Washington general manager George McPhee has admitted that the joy seemed to drain from Ovechkin’s game. And that, more than anything, is what defined him as a young player in the NHL. Now some of that emotion is seeping back into Ovechkin’s play. In his last 12 games, Ovechkin has nine goals and five assists. It is no surprise that the Caps, who replaced coach Bruce Boudreau with Dale Hunter just five weeks ago, have caught fire with four wins in a row heading into a two-game road trip to California this weekend.
“[Ovechkin’s] been playing a lot better as of late, and for us to be successful we need that,” said teammate Troy Brouwer, who corralled one of Ovechkin’s rebounds for a power-play goal on Tuesday night in a 3-1 win over Calgary.
After a 32-goal season a year ago — by far the fewest of his career — Ovechkin had just eight goals and 11 assists through the first 26 games this year. An outburst on the bench directed at Boudreau late in a Nov.?1 game against Anaheim was widely read as the frustrations of a struggling star without the patience to make the necessary changes to his game.
But in recent weeks, Ovechkin has begun to experiment. His patented move — a cut toward the middle of the ice almost immediately after crossing into the offensive zone — had become such an expected part of his repertoire that opposing defensemen had little trouble diffusing it with quality stick work or a blocked shot.
In recent weeks, however, Ovechkin has employed that move far less often. He even has begun driving around the goal entirely and coming out on the right wing. He scored a goal that way Dec. 7 at Ottawa. Ovechkin now has 17 goals — creeping back into the top 15 in the NHL in that category — and 16 assists.
“Right now I start go to the net more than I usually do,” Ovechkin told reporters after a practice earlier this week. “If I have opportunity to shoot, I just have to shoot the puck because if I’m not going to shoot the puck I’m not going to score. And it’s not going to be good results for me or for the team as well. I just change a little bit of [my] game [as] you can see.”
