ARLINGTON, VA — Exactly 21 years after making his NHL debut, Alex Ovechkin announced on Monday that this season will be his last.
Ovechkin’s decision ends years of retirement speculation, setting him up for a farewell tour in the final months of a historic career. To those back in DC, however, the idea of saying goodbye to a franchise legend is still hard to imagine.
“I don’t think you can really predict what it’s going to feel like (without him),” said Tom Wilson, Ovechkin’s longest-tenured teammate. “I mean, he had a nap the other day for like an hour or so, and he wasn’t around — that’s the closest thing that we’ve had to no Ovi on the Caps.”
For more than two decades, Ovechkin has helped to define an era of hockey, enthralling a generation of fans as he etched his name into the history books. He entered the league with high expectations, tasked not only with buoying a struggling Capitals team but also with revitalizing the NHL after a season-long lockout, but few could have predicted just how high his star would rise.
Ovechkin has earned 19 individual NHL awards, winning the Hart Trophy thrice and the Rocket Richard a record nine times. He became the league’s all-time leading goal scorer in April 2025, a task once thought impossible, and now has a comfortable lead with 929 career goals. He holds the record for power-play goals (331), game-winning goals (141), overtime goals (27), road goals (476), game-opening goals (154), game-tying goals (155), go-ahead goals (297), 40-goal seasons (14), and 30-goal seasons (20).
To hear him tell it, though, none of those accolades carry as much weight as the 35 pounds of silver he hoisted in 2018.
“Times fly. It’s been a pretty good career,” Ovechkin said on Monday. “The goal, to bring the Stanley Cup to DC, we did it, and that was the most important thing.”
Ovechkin and Wilson are the only two players remaining from that championship team, a fact the former remarked on last week during a team dinner in Annapolis, Md.
“O was looking at me at dinner,” Wilson recalled. “He’s like, ‘We’re the only ones left.’”
Though the official announcement didn’t come until Monday, it was during that team dinner that Ovechkin tipped his teammates off about the news.
”Shockingly, we kept some stuff quiet from you guys,” Wilson quipped to reporters.
Even if players had some advanced notice, watching the media spree at MedStar Capitals Iceplex on Monday only made Ovechkin’s decision feel more real. Knowing their time together was nearing its end only intensified players’ gratitude for a place at Ovechkin’s side.
“It’s greatness,” said Wilson. “You can’t put it into words. I think for a lot of guys that step foot in this locker room, it’s one of the biggest honors of our career, to be able to share the ice with a legend like that. He’s great. He’ll be in every single Hall of Fame in the game, and (he’s the) best goal scorer of all time. I think for all of us it’s just been a pleasure and a privilege to watch him day in, day out.”
Time has been kind to Ovechkin, who has spent years watching his peers hang up their skates. Still, he acknowledges he’s not immortal. He’s no longer the superstar talent he was in his prime, and he’s seen his role change to reflect that, playing the fewest minutes of his career (excluding injuries and ejections) in Friday night’s game against the Carolina Hurricanes.
Watching the league get “younger and younger” around him helped motivate Ovechkin’s decision, but so did his family. As much as Ovechkin’s sons Sergei and Ilya adore watching their father play, he wants to make sure he can keep up with them in the years to come.
“I’m not 20 years old,” he said. “I want to play with my kids (as they’re) growing up. Want to play hockey, play soccer, play basketball. I want to be healthy enough to do that kind of stuff.”
None of that makes preparing for the end any easier, either for a visibly-emotional Ovechkin or for those he’s leaving behind.
“The feelings that you get inside, of hearing the finality of him saying, ‘This is going to be my last year,’ there’s a lot of mixed emotions,” said head coach Spencer Carbery. “You’re almost — there’s sadness to it. And then I’ll turn into being super grateful of our relationship.”
As impressive as Ovechkin’s on-ice achievements have been, his teammates heaped just as much praise on his captaincy. The Capitals’ tight-knit locker room has been one factor in attracting free agent talent to DC, and Ovechkin has shaped the leaders that will carry the team in his absence
“I’ve learned a ton from him [during] my time in Washington: how to be a good leader, be a good person, treat people with respect,” said Dylan Strome, recently named an alternate captain. “Everyone in the locker room — when you come in here, you just feel like a family, and I feel like that’s because of him.”
“He just he just brings in enthusiasm every single day,” added Carbery. “It does not change, whether it’s January 25th, or it’s March, or the first day of training camp. He just has an enthusiasm in there and a joy for the game, a joy for life, a joy for his teammates and being around them. It doesn’t matter if you’ve played a thousand games or you played five games: you are you are in the mix with him.”
Since his fateful debut in 2005, Ovechkin has been a constant in DC, even as the team changed around him. He’s outlasted seven head coaches and two general managers, playing alongside hundreds of teammates over the years. He’s also watched a generation of players enter the league after him, many of whom grew up idolizing his play.
Not only has no Capitals player been on a team without Ovechkin, few can even remember what that looked like — Cole Hutson wasn’t even born until a few days after Ovechkin won the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year, and Ilya Protas was born the following month..
Carbery, only three years older than Ovechkin, was still in the NCAA when the then-20-year-old phenom made his NHL debut. Asked what that college student would have thought about getting to coach Ovechkin, Carbery grinned.
“You are insane if I thought for a second that I’d be coaching the Washington Capitals back at St. Norbert College,” he said. “I had no idea where my path was going.”
Ovechkin rarely wants individual fanfare — one appeal of announcing his final season, certainly, is not having to answer questions about it — but that legacy, those memories, helped him accept a protracted swan song this year.
“O, as you guys all know, doesn’t want that, but understands that he’s such an important piece of this sports history and for this generation,” Carbery said. “I told him a story yesterday, of imagine going into, [for example,] Minneapolis. He’s only going to go there once. And a 12-year-old kid right now, you know, his dad’s 45 and says, ‘I’m going to take you to go see Alex Ovechkin play…’
“In 30 years, [he’ll] tell his kids about watching Ovi play his last season in Minneapolis. Even though he doesn’t love that, and the handshakes and it being about him individually I think there is part of him that’s understanding that people want to say goodbye.”
Having a firm deadline may also light a fire under the rest of the team, knowing they have one more chance to get their captain the Stanley Cup. After missing the playoffs last season, the Capitals added serious offensive firepower in Alex Tuch and Jordan Kyrou over the summer, moves that helped convince Ovechkin to return this fall.
Both Wilson and Strome insisted that they were fully motivated before Ovechkin’s announcement (”The goal doesn’t change,” said Strome) but Ovechkin’s chase of the goal record in 2024-25 certainly seemed to have an impact on that team, which vastly outperformed expectations to finish first in the Eastern Conference.
“Even though it was an individual goal-scoring record, there was so many things about that chase that brought the team together,” Carbery said. “So hopefully it’s the same way, knowing this will be his last year in the National Hockey League.
“Hopefully, as you go through a grind of an 82-game schedule, when you’re trying to muster up some energy and some enthusiasm and some leg strength and you’re tired and you’ve been on the road, hopefully that’ll push us just a few more percent.”
The Capitals will have six more months to savor sharing the ice with Ovechkin, more if they return to the playoffs. But as difficult as it is to imagine the end, his teammates are thrilled to be along for the ride.
“He’ll forever be the captain of the Washington Capitals, the greatest ever,” said Wilson. “So it’s emotional. But sooner or later, I think, it’s one of those things: all good things must come to an end. He’s (played) 22 years and leaving it all out there still.”
