Alex and Sid Take Their Emergent Allure to the Olympics

I no more know who’s going to prevail in the men’s Olympic hockey tournament that kicks off today than I do who’s going to win the Stanley Cup in June, but I do know this: four years from now, Alexander Ovechkin will be representing Russia again in the Sochi Winter Games, and I can’t imagine he’ll be the lone NHLer.

A mere month ago, these Olympics seemed a bit of a distraction from our NHL season, didn’t they? Especially in Washington. And back then there was much chatter, too, about how the NHL’s previous participation in Winter Olympic Games hadn’t produced the net marketing effects the league had designs on.

But now that they’re here, is there a hockey fan in North America or Europe who isn’t enamored about this competition? The leadup to the Games last week was unlike anything I can remember for hockey. Ryan Getzlaf’s high ankle sprain made New Jersey’s struggles with Ilya Kovalchuk a sidebar story. The Capitals were embarked on a franchise-smashing winning streak, and while that was big news in D.C., it struggled for coverage space set beside the buildup for hockey in Vancouver.

American Jack Johnson was so excited to immerse himself in Olympics lore that on a lone day off between Kings’ games late last week he flew from California to Vancouver and back just so that he could participate in the Games’ opening ceremonies. Last night the NHL Network ran nothing but repeats of its new 30-minute feature, “Sid the Kid vs. Alexander the Great: The Olympians.” In the program we learned that a teenaged Sidney Crosby approached Hockey Canada about being, literally, a waterboy so that he could be close to the national team that was training in his hometown of Halifax. We also learned that little in hockey means as much to Alexander Ovechkin as wearing his country’s colors.

If the league is somehow trying to downplay or temper enthusiasm for its athletes participating in the Olympics, last night’s programming wasn’t quite the way to achieve that. We can be assured that in their enthusiasm the likes of Jack Johnson, Sidney Crosby, and Alexander Ovechkin are matched manifold among the hockey players who’ve journeyed to Vancouver.

These Games have a buzz we’ve never before seen for our game — they are, quite conspicuously, crowding out buzz for most other events; it’s Hockey and by the way some sleddin’ and skating at these Games — and you have to credit the league’s leading lights for generating it — nos. 87 and 8.

The league, we’re told, wants to turn its back on its involvement with the Games? Gary Bettman’s- run league apparently does, anyway.

I have some theories as to why hockey has become so emergent in Vancouver — and why it is setting the table for another dominant position in Russia in four years. These Games arrive less than a year removed from last spring’s much anticipated, first-ever playoff showdown between the NHL’s two biggest stars. It was the postseason’s best series, and the rare one that not only met the hyperventilating hype accompanying it but actually exceeded it. At Verizon Center press events were held in the arena’s basketball gym to accommodate the overflow media coverage.

Criticism of the league’s participation in the Olympics of the past is unfair relative to its present. These Games belong principally to two players, Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin. When they first entered the league in the autumn of 2005 the hope was that they’d forge a Bird-Magic kind of rivalry. Last May went a long way to doing just that — a high-stakes showdown. If there’s a remarkable gold medal game between them in two weeks’ time, chapter II will be added. Imagine if that game is a classic, and imagine the anticipation for its rematch in Sochi.

Bird and Magic of course garnered the legendary status they did largely by virtue of their NBA Finals showdowns. Ovi and Sid can’t. Instead, they can square off for the high stakes of Olympic gold. American NBAers competing in the Olympics were labeled a “Dream Team” back in the early 1990s. These Winter Olympics offer Dream Teams. Hence the buzz.

Two or three years ago, there was for both Ovechkin and Crosby a sense that hockey hadn’t yet seen the best they were going to deliver. Today both players are entering the prodigious prime of their respective careers, and it’s a beautiful sight to behold. Both are captains, big-time goal scorers, go-to guys in the clutch. Crosby’s already won a Cup, and he’s a central reason the Pens will christen a brand new rink this fall. Ovechkin has turned Washington into a hockey town, his team’s mid-season games obliterating 35 years of local television ratings records. Suddenly Bird and Magic seem an apt comparison.

But those two never faced off in an Olympics.

For almost every other sport, the Olympics actually have to be contested before hero storylines can be written. But hockey — NHL hockey — brings with its stars to the Games the lead storylines in advance. This, too, adds to the buzz.

There are nuisances and hardships associated with the NHL’s participation in these Games to be sure, and some of them are not of the incidental variety. A few Capitals’ players this season, not often for attribution, have spoken of their belief that the compressed schedule during Olympic seasons irrefutably inflates the number of player injuries. And having the league compete still just some 48 hours prior to the start of the Olympic hockey competition makes a mockery of the kind of team-building every coach at every other level of hockey labors long and hard for.

But what exactly is the alternative to Olympic hockey sans Sidney and Ovi, among dozens of other global hockey talents? Are we seriously talking about raiding college rosters some six weeks after they’ve already been picked at for the World Juniors? And how could any collegian miss up to three weeks of school in the middle of a semester? If we’re to consider going “Pro Lite” for the Games, how do you compress any further an American Hockey League schedule that’s already crammed full every weekend?

You don’t. Because you shouldn’t.

I don’t have the answers to the ongoing impasse between the NHL and the Russian Hockey Federation, nor do I believe there is a “perfect” in-season schedule for the NHL during Olympic years, one that well balances an acceptable shut-down period with getting Olympians settled together with a bare minimum of practice time. I do know this: something special is shaping up in Vancouver, and we are witnessing merely its dawn.

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