SAN JOSE – Former San Jose Sharks goaltender Evgeni Nabokov knew Washington Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin was destined for greatness from the first time he heard about him dominating youth hockey leagues in Moscow nearly 30 years ago.
OK, perhaps that’s a stretch. But there was little question that Nabokov, who played for Moscow Dynamo from 1994 to 1997, kept hearing about this big 10-year-old kid who was always around the rink and creating a stir on the ice.
“I was a little kid, I asked him about sticks and all kinds of stuff,” Ovechkin said of Nabokov in 2015. “We played together and against each other, and it was a great honor to know this guy as a person and play against him and score some goals.”
“People even back then were already talking about, ‘This is going to be the next Gretzky or whatever,” said Nabokov, who moved to the U.S. in 1997 and later became the winningest goalie in Sharks history. “But he wasn’t Gretzky. It was, you’re going to be a hell of a player.”
They were right.
The Capitals play the Sharks on Saturday at SAP Center with Ovechkin, now 39, just eight goals away from tying Wayne Gretzky atop the NHL’s all-time goal-scoring list. Gretzky had 894 goals in a dizzying career that lasted from 1979 to 1999, and Ovechkin, already with 33 goals this season, is second on the all-time list with 886 in his 20-year career.
Except for the pandemic-shortened 2020-2021 season, Ovechkin has scored at least 31 goals every year he’s been in the NHL. A nine-time winner of the Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy as the NHL’s leading single-season goal scorer, Ovechkin has scored at least 50 goals nine times.
Now it’s just a matter of whether Ovechkin will break Gretzky’s record this season, with the Capitals having 16 games left, or next season.
“He’s a freak of nature,” Nabokov said. “He’s so strong and so naturally gifted. I think his curve on his stick is also really different from most of the guys.
“He takes 10 shots a game and he probably will tell you, if I’m going to take 10 shots a game, one will go in, and that’s all he’s looking for. And if he’s lucky, then it’s going to be two or three.”
Nabokov and Ovechkin have been friends for a long time. When Nabokov announced his retirement in San Jose in Feb. 2015, Ovechkin, with the Capitals in town, was there.
“I know him since he was playing for Dynamo,” Ovechkin said of Nabokov on Friday at SAP Center. “He’s a tremendous human being, and obviously a legend from here.”
While he was with the Sharks, Nabokov only played against Ovechkin and the Capitals a handful of times. Nabokov said that Ovechkin liked to talk trash, but the Calder Trophy-winning goalie was always quick to remind him that he didn’t have much success against San Jose, at least early on.
“He threatens to score five goals or three goals, whatever it is,” Nabokov said. “You would be warming up, and then on the red line, he will tell you that he is going to just destroy you and blah, blah, blah. So I remind him all the time in my first (few) years, he didn’t have a sniff in here.”
That changed on Oct.15, 2009, when Ovechkin, in his fourth career game against San Jose, finally found the net against the Sharks, his favorite team growing up.
With Nabokov in net, Ovechkin had 13 shots on goal, including eight in one period, and scored twice in a 4-1 Capitals win at what was then called the Verizon Center. Ovechkin now has 16 goals and 28 points in 28 career games against the Sharks.
“I remember it,” Ovechkin said 10 years ago. “It was in Washington and I scored two in the second period and I was laughing at him all the time.”
Ovechkin didn’t stop there against Nabokov, who allowed a few more goals to the Great 8 while he was playing in New York.
“I think he scored two, and I never heard the end of it,” Nabokov said. “In Washington, their bench is right there, and every time out, he would skate by and say, ‘more coming, more coming.’ ”
Ovechkin wasn’t kidding.
Along with a staggering 560 even strength goals, Ovechkin also has 321 on the power play. A right-shot, Ovechkin’s favorite spot to set up is the left faceoff dot, where he unleashes blistering one-timers on sometimes helpless goalies.
Nabokov said when he played for the Islanders from 2011 to 2014, the team adjusted its penalty kill specifically just to slow down Ovechkin.
“For me personally, I just tried, as much as possible, to be aggressive and cut down angles, sometimes hoping that it’s going to just hit you if it’s a one-timer,” Nabokov said. “Because I don’t know if anybody has a recipe,” to stop him.
According to Nabokov, what separates Ovechkin from other snipers with lethal one-timers is that his shot is so hard to pick up as it comes off the blade, the legality of which, Sharks goalie Alexandar Georgiev joked, is questionable.
“Those blades he has, I don’t know, they’re borderline legal,” Georgiev said. “But I feel once he slaps those, they’re kind of uncontrollable. I think he just tries to put it on net hard and see what happens.”
Still, Nabokov, who was teammates with Ovechkin for Russia at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics, could not be more proud that the kid he first heard about three decades ago is about to break one of the NHL’s greatest records.
“It’s such a joy to watch every time he steps on the ice. He has that charisma about him. He has presence that he’s a leader,” said Nabokov, who is now in his third season as the Sharks’ director of goaltending. “What he’s doing, I think it’s remarkable.”