The walk to the White House from Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., takes about 20 minutes. In early May 2009, Alex Ovechkin was contemplating the short trip he and his Washington Capitals teammates would make after rolling to the franchise’s first Stanley Cup.
Earlier that day, May 4, 2009, Ovechkin had recorded a hat trick and the Capitals beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 4-3, in Game 2 of their second-round Stanley Cup playoff series. The Capitals led the series 2-0 and Ovechkin was at the peak of his powers. By then, he had already scored 219 regular-season goals in four seasons. He had pushed a historically mediocre franchise into the upper echelons of the league. The Cup seemed like a logical next step.
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Enter his nemesis, Sidney Crosby, the guy he came into the league with in 2005 and a player who matched his hat trick in that playoff game with one of his own.
Of all the games their teams have played against one another over the past 19 seasons, that game stands apart. But Crosby’s goal, late in regulation, gave him no joy.
“He wasn’t happy,” says Bill Guerin, Crosby’s winger at the time and now GM of the Minnesota Wild. “He was pissed we were still losing. I don’t blame him. You get a hat trick on the road in a playoff game, you’re not expecting to be in a 2-0 series hole.”
Crosby’s unhappiness didn’t last long. The Penguins won that series and later, the Stanley Cup, their first of three with Crosby leading the way. Ovechkin and the Capitals didn’t get to make that trip to the White House until 2018, when they finally broke through.
From the series opener in 2009 through the 2017 playoffs, the Penguins and Capitals played 13 one-goal playoff games, five decided in overtime. The Capitals lost two Game 7s at home. Ovechkin outscored Crosby in total goals (12-10) and points (28-23), but the Penguins more often than not came out on top.
“It felt like nothing I did was enough,” Ovechkin says of those three playoff showdowns. “All the goals. All the points. Who cares? They won.”
Crosby knew his responsibility was to counter whatever Ovechkin threw at the Penguins. “I knew I had to match him, or at least get close,” Crosby says.
Crosby has never felt that way about any other player. Then again, Ovechkin is not just any other player to Crosby. The feeling is mutual. Dubbed generational talents (before that phrase became applicable to every top prospect), Ovechkin and Crosby were unanimous first overall picks in the 2004 and 2005 NHL Drafts — the ones staged before and after a labor dispute shut down the league for an entire season. When play resumed in October 2005, Ovechkin and Crosby were the young stars expected to skate hockey out of its dark period.
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Since the beginning, Crosby and Ovechkin became the NHL’s answer to the NBA’s Bird and Magic of the 1980s. A rivalry of equals that carried the league to new heights. Now a $6 billion industry with scoring near 30-year highs, Crosby and Ovechkin are 19 years into a historic duel that is closing in on 100 showdowns, including four tense postseason series — the winner of each going on to claim the Cup.
Despite the arrival of other generational talents, from the Edmonton Oilers’ Connor McDavid to the Chicago Blackhawks’ Connor Bedard, no current NHL players have the name recognition of Crosby and Ovechkin. They may no longer rule the sport as consensus top players, but the foundation of the modern era was built upon their shoulders.
“We saved the NHL,” Ovechkin says.
Now 36 and 38 years old, Crosby and Ovechkin navigate the twilight of their hockey careers while also contemplating where they might gather to hash it all out over beers.
Just not yet.
As Crosby insists: “We’re a long way from finished, I hope.”
Hyped as franchise-altering prospects atop their respective NHL Draft classes, Ovechkin and Crosby’s debut season was a showcase rivalry for a league that was in trouble.
Ovechkin, was the 20-year-old Russian from one of hockey’s flagship cities, Moscow; Crosby, the 18-year-old from Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia — a small town nowhere near the traditional hotbeds in hockey’s home country, Canada.
They were expected to revive two downtrodden franchises in important American markets. Ovechkin’s Capitals had never won the Stanley Cup. The Penguins, a power in the 1990s, had bottomed out. Their iconic owner, Mario Lemieux, even allowed Crosby — called “The Next One” by none other than “The Great One,” Wayne Gretzky — to live in his guest house to smooth his transition to the league.
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Ovechkin is the youngest scion of elite athletes; his mother owns two Olympic gold medals and is a former world champion basketball player. His father starred in soccer.
Crosby was the eldest son of a goaltender who had been drafted by the Montreal Canadiens but never played beyond Canadian junior hockey.
Everything about Ovechkin’s upbringing screamed Russian Federation royalty. Conversely, Crosby, whose parents held regular jobs and sacrificed their young lives so he could travel across his country to play hockey, was cast as a respectful, appreciative hard worker.
That was the narrative, anyway.
In reality, Ovechkin and Crosby each displayed elite hand-eye coordination at young ages and a preternatural fondness for grueling training. Ovechkin wouldn’t let his parents change the channel if any hockey game was televised. Crosby destroyed a dryer by treating it like a goal.
“Some things they same,” says Evgeni Malkin, who has carved out his own historic place in hockey despite playing in the shadow of Crosby in Pittsburgh and Ovechkin for Russia. “Strong. Smart. Tough.”
Malkin says that both stars thrived in the most important moments, and that hockey was a “big part of life” for them.
“Not biggest,” Malkin clarifies. “Family is biggest, for sure. Maybe they are same like that. But also, you know, very different. Ovi, goals — he’s probably best ever. Sid is for sure best player ever.”
Ovechkin and Crosby knew of each other, but they didn’t know each other. They were competitors chasing the same hardware. The Cup and trophies and league-wide adulation.
Ovechkin won the first battle, landing the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie, even though Crosby had also produced 100 points that season. That rookie competition was exactly what the NHL needed.
“We banked a lot on them,” says Brendan Shanahan, a Hockey Hall of Fame player who is now the Toronto Maple Leafs president. “We’d lost a season. Our fans just wanted hockey back. But we had to make these new rules to open up the game, make it more attractive to our fans, casual fans, advertisers, everybody.
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“That’s where Sid and Alex came in. It wasn’t explicitly said, ‘Hey, you guys go save the league.’ But, well, that was the hope. And it became obvious really fast they could.”
After Ovechkin won the Calder Trophy, Crosby responded with his first of two Hart (league MVP) and Art Ross (points leader) trophies. In their third season, Ovechkin claimed his lone Art Ross and the first of his three Harts. And then Crosby took the Penguins to the Stanley Cup Final in 2008.
Season No. 4 saw Malkin, always in the shadow of the two young stars, win the Art Ross while Ovechkin won the Hart and Crosby became the youngest captain of a Stanley Cup champion.
“It wasn’t a changing of the guard,” says Luc Robitaille, a Hockey Hall of Famer and current president of the Los Angeles Kings. “It was Sidney, Alex — and Malkin — ripping everything up and remaking the league as their own.
“But as great as Malkin was and is, it was really about Sidney and Alex. And those early years, it felt as if you didn’t miss when the Penguins and Capitals played, again because of Sidney and Alex.
“They were the show.”
There was not much time or interest in getting to know one another in their earliest seasons. Malkin’s up-and-down relationship with his countryman Ovechkin didn’t help. Nor did the competition for the unofficial title of “world’s best player.”
Crosby appeared to have that locked down until a hit from the Capitals’ David Steckel late in the second period of the Winter Classic in Pittsburgh on Jan. 1, 2011, cost him chunks of that season and the next. After another lockout shortened the 2012-13 season, Crosby was running away with the scoring title and presumably his second Hart Trophy before missing the final month-plus with a broken jaw. Ovechkin rallied from a slow start to pace the NHL in goals, which helped him earn another Hart.
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Their individual rivalry fueling his motivation, Crosby promised to “win all the trophies next season” at the NHL Awards Show in 2013. He did, claiming the Ross, Hart, and Ted Lindsay Award for 2013-14.
The Penguins, however, underwent front-office and coaching upheaval similar to what had hit the Capitals in previous seasons. Within a year and a half, and because of the NHL’s new postseason format, there was a sense that Ovechkin’s Capitals and Crosby’s Penguins were again on a collision course going into the 2016 postseason.
“I had the best seat in the house,” says Barry Trotz, who coached those Capitals and is now GM with the Nashville Predators.
After earning the Conn Smythe Award (playoff MVP) for the Penguins’ back-to-back Cup wins in 2016 and 2017, and with two Olympic gold medals and a World Cup title also on his resume, Crosby had firmly etched his place in the pantheon of all-time NHL greats.
Ovechkin felt he deserved to be viewed similarly. Trotz, who was an assistant coach for Team Canada when Crosby captained it to gold at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, felt a heart-to-heart with his Capitals star was necessary.
“Alex took those losses very hard,” Trotz says. “We had an honest conversation because Alex really thought he was doing his job the only way he could — scoring goals, which he did a lot against the Penguins.”
Trotz, also seeking his first Cup championship, told Ovechkin — by this point, widely acknowledged as a serious threat to Gretzky’s career goals record (894) — his “legacy wasn’t all those goals.” Ovechkin nodded in agreement.
“I need to win,” he told Trotz.
“Alex, I want to win it more for you than me,” Trotz told him. “But the way we’re trying isn’t working.”
Trotz predicted the Capitals would see the Penguins again in the 2018 postseason — and then he made a request.
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“Go back, watch all those series against Pittsburgh,” Trotz told him. “Watch what Crosby does in every game. We can’t win — you can’t get past this — by only scoring.”
Ovechkin nodded again. He would learn from Crosby as opposed to just competing against him.
“That’s when I thought, ‘He’s ready to win his,’” Trotz says.
A celebration befitting a championship was ongoing in the visitors’ dressing room at PPG Paints Arena on May 7, 2018. That night, the Capitals defeated the Penguins, 2-1, ending Crosby’s quest to captain the NHL’s first three-peat Cup club since the New York Islanders won four in a row to start the 1980s.
Ovechkin set up the winning goal early in overtime to stun a sellout crowd in Pittsburgh.
After the handshake line, during which Malkin told Ovechkin “Go get yours,” Crosby was alone among the Penguins who didn’t look exhausted, and frankly somewhat relieved. The loss still bothers him.
“Not a lot of teams get the chance to win three in a row,” Trotz says. “Pittsburgh probably would have had we not stopped them. … Those series, in hindsight, are tough to beat in terms of memories.”
Or, as the Capitals’ Tom Wilson says, “I think when I’m telling my grandkids about my NHL career, they’ll probably want to hear about me playing with Ovi against Sid. And, uh, those are some good stories to tell, you know?”
Within the next couple of years, Ovechkin should surpass Gretzky as the NHL goal king and Crosby likely will become only the ninth player to have scored at least 600 goals and 1,700 points.
Crosby, fourth, and Ovechkin, sixth, were the highest-ranked current players in The Athletic’s NHL99 project.
“They overdelivered on what was expected,” Shanahan says. “It’s almost like they’re taken for granted.”
Trotz agrees: “We don’t appreciate them nearly enough for what they did. Every player, coach, manager like myself — anybody involved in this league, we all have a lot more zeros in front of the decimal points on our checks because of Sid and Alex. So I hope when they’re done, they can get together and appreciate what they’ve done for the health of our league.”
That’s the plan, both Ovechkin and Crosby say. They’ll have a long talk. Over some drinks. Maybe dinner.
How does that look though?
Maybe with Crosby, who adores traveling to Europe, heading to Moscow for a visit with Malkin and scheduling some time to meet with Ovechkin and his family. Or maybe it’s Ovechkin bringing the family to Crosby’s lake house in Halifax one summer.
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“Haven’t really thought that far ahead,” Crosby says. “I do drink beer. I know he does. So …”
The ferocity between them has cooled. At the most recent NHL All-Star Game, Ovechkin’s son participated in the skills competition alongside his dad and Crosby. “When he is older, he is going to tell everybody, ‘I played with Sidney Crosby on a line and got to do skills shot,’” Ovechkin says. “It’s going to be pretty sick for him.”
“The first thing I asked him was, ‘You’re a lefty?’” Crosby says, laughing (Ovechkin is a right shot). “It was cool to be able to see him see his dad do that. And, you know, it was fun for me to be a part of it. … Definitely isn’t something I would have thought might happen at the beginning.”
So a thaw, just as there was for Magic and Bird toward the end of their careers — not that either Ovechkin or Crosby is keen to think of their 19th seasons being near the end.
“I think we probably both want to stick around a little longer,” Crosby says. “So it’s not time for those beers, or whatever we’ll drink, yet.
“But, yeah, probably we can relate to a lot of things that we’ve been through together over the years. … I think that feeling exists, that maybe we’ve been through something pretty special.”
Ovechkin says it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what they end up talking about.
“What’s happened between me and him, it’s staying between us,” he says. “But that pressure — he gave it to me all those years. Kind of like, ‘OK, I have to work harder to be at the same (level).’ I’m pretty sure he was the same. … I think he gave me that kind of drive to go to the game and think, ‘OK, what’s he going to do?’ Not just when we play each other. I’d think, ‘If he’s going to get four points or five points, I have to do the same.’
“We played so much. So, team-wise, and personal-wise, we had to know who was No. 1. That was how I thought.”
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Malkin jokes that the answer to the question “Who is better?” is “different in Pittsburgh and Canada than in Washington and Russia.”
“Both guys still great,” Malkin says, nodding his head in the direction of Crosby’s locker. “I think they both, like, play forever. Now (is) not time to be friends. More games to go.”
About to enter their third decade as the North and South poles of the modern NHL, having staged an individual rivalry unlike anything since the days of Gordie Howe and Maurice Richard in the NHL’s Original Six era, there is something fitting about Ovechkin and Crosby experiencing something that happens to all living legends.
McDavid is winning trophies for which they used to compete. Bedard is the new kid on the big block. A lot of other very good-to-great players are trying to make the NHL their league.
Crosby didn’t go so far as to say, “Bring it on.” But he did say, “Hopefully we’re still a little bit away from being pushed out of the way.”
Ovechkin, always brash, views the last chapter of his rivalry with Crosby somewhat more combatively — almost Ovi and Sid versus The World.
“We saved the league. Now they come in, and I guess we’re old news,” Ovechkin says. “But we saved it. It’s up to those guys to come in and prove me wrong that we’re not the best.”
GO DEEPER
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(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic. Photos: Scott Taetsch, Patrick Smith / Getty Images; Ric Tapia / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
