The puck left Dainius Zubrus’ stick along the boards and found Alex Ovechkin in the slot.
Ovechkin unleashed the one timer that would become his calling card over his NHL career, beating Columbus Blue Jackets goaltender Pascal Leclaire.
Nearly 20 years have passed since Ovechkin shot that puck to score his first career NHL goal, one of two he recorded in his debut game on Oct. 5, 2005.
It was the first of 897 career goals and counting for #8, who would go on to break a goal-scoring record held by Wayne Gretzky that most people thought could and would never be surpassed.
It was also a turning point for hockey in the D.C. area. Ovechkin would lead the Capitals to a Stanley Cup in 2018, but he also reignited interest in the team and sport of hockey.
Inside Washington’s crease at the other end of the ice that day in 2005, Olaf Kölzig could feel the shift as soon as the puck went into the Blue Jackets’ net.
He’d been with the Capitals through a few seasons of poor performance and dismal crowds. When Ovechkin scored, the thing he loves to do more than anything else, everything changed. The building went crazy.
“To see the way he electrified that building that night and now he’s electrified the whole city, he’s electrified the National Hockey League, there’s just something about him,” Kölzig, who now works in player development with the Capitals, told CBC Sports.
“He’s just a once in a lifetime superstar and has just a way of bringing everybody on board for the ride.”
The rookie
As a season-long lockout ended ahead of the 2005-06 season, everyone was talking about two incoming rookies: Ovechkin and Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby. Both still teenagers, they were lifelines for struggling franchises.
A couple weeks into training camp that year, Bryan Muir’s buddies asked if they should take Crosby or Ovechkin in their hockey pools.
In his mid-30s on a professional tryout with the Capitals, Muir was a grizzled NHL veteran who’d won a Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche a few years earlier. He wasn’t sold on the Russian rookie yet. The NHL was a steep learning curve, and Muir hadn’t yet seen whether his new teammate had what it took.
That all changed when the training camp roster was cut, and then split into black and white teams for a scrimmage.
“I think he ended up getting a breakaway, scoring top shelf and then running a couple of guys over,” Muir recalled. “There was this gasp of like, holy smokes, this kid is the real deal if he can do this.”
Muir called his friends shortly after.
“I think you should take him,” he said.
At one of the team’s first practices, Kölzig remembers a young Ovechkin walking through the room with a notepad, writing down everyone’s names so he wouldn’t forget them.
The first time he slapped the puck at Kölzig during practice, it was with a velocity the veteran netminder wasn’t used to seeing. He was grateful it didn’t hit him.
Velocity and accuracy
But Ovechkin’s shot isn’t just great because it’s hard. It’s also often accurate, a combination that few players can boast.
With a big toe curve on his stick, getting the puck in the middle of his blade can make it seem almost like his stick is a slingshot, and the puck a missile.
“If he doesn’t get it directly in the middle of his blade or he gets it on his heel or on his toe, it still comes with velocity, but then it has movement on it,” Kölzig said. “That makes it even tougher [to stop].”
To this day, former teammate Jeff Halpern, who’s now an assistant coach with the Tampa Bay Lightning, worries the puck will hurt someone if it comes off Ovechkin’s stick and doesn’t go into the net.
“You’re not even like, I hope he doesn’t put it in the net,” Halpern said. “You’re worried about the guy on that side that has to face that block.”
The first game
Midway through the second period back on Oct. 5, 2005, the play that led to Ovechkin’s first NHL goal started with Halpern. He pushed the puck behind the Columbus net before taking a hit along the boards.
Zubrus picked it up and Ovechkin was open for a one timer, as he would be so many times in his career.
“I saw the pass go out and honestly, how fast the puck was in the net was different for me,” said Halpern, who earned the secondary assist on the goal. “It was almost like people talk about when someone hits a baseball and it has a different sound or a golf ball has a different sound. When he took that shot, it just had a different feel.”
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The players on the ice, including Muir and Halpern, swarmed Ovechkin after he scored. Ovechkin kissed his glove and pointed skyward, the first of hundreds of times he’d honour his late younger brother after scoring.
His second goal came on the power play a few minutes later. Ovechkin finished with a team-high five shots on net in the game.
Throughout that first season, some of the veteran players, including Muir, tried to mentor their younger teammate. There was no longer any doubt about his talent. But they worried about his durability, with his propensity for running through players.
“He did not care,” Muir said. “He would literally go through everyone.”
But Ovechkin’s size, currently measured at six-foot-three and 238 pounds, has put him on the right end of a lot of those hits. His durability became key to eventually breaking Gretzky’s goal-scoring record.
Another thing that never changed is Ovechkin’s excitement for scoring. Teammates like Kölzig thought that exuberance might fade as Ovechkin got older.
It hasn’t, whether it’s his own goal or a teammate’s goal.
“It’s infectious,” Kölzig said. “There’s a reason why our team has been successful almost every year since he’s been on it. He brings everybody along on the emotional ride.”
Transforming Washington hockey
When Halpern was growing up in Maryland, the Capitals often came second to the Baltimore Orioles or the since-relocated NBA team when it came to fan interest.
Nearly two decades and a Stanley Cup later, Halpern can see the impact of his former teammate’s arrival. Ovechkin, along with players like Nicklas Bäckström and Mike Green, made it cool to be a hockey fan.
Halpern was captain of the Capitals in Ovechkin’s first season, and saw the buzz around the team rise from the depths of a lost lockout season and years of disappointment on the ice.
“For years, it was a scary arena to go into because of how good they were and him,” Halpern said.
“But also it created a whole generation of hockey players and rinks that came up. He single-handedly sparked a huge growth for the D.C. area as far as hockey.”
When he scored the record-setting goal #895 against the New York Islanders in April, Kölzig wrote a congratulations text to Ovechkin. He noted that he’d helped in a small way: Ovechkin put a puck past Kölzig in 2018 after the goaltender had moved on to the Tampa Bay Lightning.
WATCH | Ovechkin scores goal No. 895 to surpass Gretzky:
Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin is the NHL’s all-time scoring king with 895 goals, after beating Wayne Gretzky’s record with a power-play goal against the New York Islanders on Sunday.
Ovechkin texted back to say Kölzig had actually assisted on five of his goals, which was news to the goalie. It was a reminder of how much Ovechkin loves scoring goals, that he hasn’t forgotten even the smallest details about nearly all of them.
Nine hundred should be in reach when Ovechkin returns next season (playoff goals are counted separately), and so could a second Stanley Cup. The second-round playoff series between the Capitals and Carolina Hurricanes is tied 1-1. Game 3 is set for Saturday at 6 p.m. ET.
But it all started with a one timer from the slot, and no one defending the player who would become the most prolific goal scorer in NHL history.
“It’s very cool just to be a hockey person witnessing all that, seeing all that,” Halpern said. “I think it’s great to kind of say I was a small part of it.”
