Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby On Divergent Paths Ahead Of NHL ...

Washington Capitals left wing Alex Ovechkin and Pittsburgh Penguins center Sidney Crosby. (Photo by ... [+] Jeanine Leech/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

In hockey circles, they’ve been mentioned in the same breath for the better part of two decades.

But with less than a month to go before the beginning of the NHL’s 2024 Stanley Cup playoffs, circumstances couldn’t be much more opposite for Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby.

On Sunday, Ovechkin scored his 25th and 26th goals of the year as the Washington Capitals blanked the Winnipeg Jets 3-0. Ovechkin has eight goals in his last five games — the same number as his first 43 games of this season. That puts him 47 goals away from surpassing Wayne Gretzky for first place on the all-time list.

Ovechkin scored his ninth goal of the year on Jan. 27, right before the All-Star break. At that time, the Capitals and the Pittsburgh Penguins were tied in the standings with 51 points each — both six points back of the Detroit Red Wings, who held the second wild-card spot.

After the break, Ovechkin kept scoring, putting together a six-game goal streak. He now has 18 goals in his last 24 games, where the Capitals have gone 13-8-3. On Sunday, they moved one point ahead of Detroit, into the second wild-card berth.

Meanwhile, over in Pittsburgh, Crosby led his team with 27 goals and 48 points in 45 games heading into their last game before the All-Star break. But he has managed just seven goals in the 25 games since.

And even when he’s scoring, the Penguins aren’t winning. Sunday’s loss to the Colorado Avalanche perfectly embodied the team’s issues: Crosby tallied a goal and three assists to stake his team to a 4-0 lead, only to see the Avalanche come all the way back and win 5-4 in overtime.

Since Jan. 26, the Penguins are 9-13-3. They’re now eight points behind Detroit and nine back of Washington. With 12 games remaining, their playoff torch is all-but-extinguished.

One season ago, both the Penguins and the Capitals saw long streaks of consecutive playoff appearances come to an end. For Pittsburgh, it was 16 years starting in Crosby’s second season, 2006-07, with Stanley Cup wins in 2009, 2016 and 2017.

Washington made the playoffs in 14 of 15 years starting in Ovechkin’s third season, 2007-08, and won the championship in 2018.

To re-set their franchise after last year’s miss, the Capitals brought in the youngest coach in the NHL, Spencer Carbery, who’s less than four years older than Ovechkin, 38. Early in the season, Nicklas Backstrom announced that he was stepping away from the game after undergoing hip resurfacing surgery, leaving Ovechkin without his favorite set-up man. Center Evgeny Kuznetsov also struggled, leading to healthy scratches and a stint in the NHL’s player assistance program. He was moved to the Carolina Hurricanes ahead of the March trade deadline.

So the Capitals were forced to get young in a hurry. Ovechkin’s current success is coming on a line with 23-year-old center Connor McMichael, a first-round draft pick from 2019 who spent most of last season in the AHL with the Hershey Bears. This year, he’s up to 16 goals while averaging nearly 16 minutes a game.

After Kuznetsov’s departure, Hendrix Lapierre is also now playing a regular role down the middle. The 22-year-old was a first-round pick in 2020.

Earlier in the season, there was concern that the Capitals’ focus on helping Ovechkin earn the goal-scoring record could end up blocking a necessary rebuild and hold back the progress of the team’s prospects. Instead, circumstances have led to opportunities for players like McMichael and Lapierre. In turn, that has re-ignited the captain’s scoring fuse and rocketed the team back into playoff contention.

In Pittsburgh, the winds of change began to blow late in 2021, when Fenway Sports Group acquired a controlling interest in the franchise for $875 million.

Though the team hadn’t won a playoff round since lifting the Cup in 2017, owernship and then-general manager Ron Hextall elected to double down on their core group of veterans who were approaching unrestricted free agency in the summer of 2022. Kris Letang and Evgeni Malkin were each inked to 35+ contracts of six and four years, respectively, while 30-year-old Bryan Rust and 29-year-old Rickard Rakell also received six-year deals.

At the trade deadline on March 3, 2023, the Penguins were tucked into the first wild-card spot in the East, with a five-point cushion. But they managed just a 9-10-2 record for the rest of the season, and missed out on the postseason by one point. That led to the firings of Hextall and team president Brian Burke.

In came former Toronto Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas. His first big moves were a five-year contract for starting goalie Tristan Jarry, a six-year UFA deal for defenseman Ryan Graves and a blockbuster trade to acquire defenseman Erik Karlsson.

But despite a renewed commitment to a ‘win-now’ approach built on the backs of veterans — and another standout season from Crosby, now 36 — the Penguins continued to hover around the playoff cut-line all year.

Then, with longtime Crosby linemate Jake Guentzel approaching his unrestricted free agency this summer, Dubas swallowed hard as the 2024 deadline approached and sent him to the Carolina Hurricanes.

When asked what he thought about how the team would handle the rest of the season after Guentzel’s departure, Crosby deflected the question back toward management. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s probably a better question for them.”

Both Crosby and Ovechkin have been fiercely loyal to the organizations that drafted them first overall in back-to-back seasons, signing lengthy contracts that exceeded the maximum of eight years that’s allowed under the current CBA at team-friendly valuations.

Ovechkin’s $124-million deal ran for 13 years, starting in 2008, and carried an annual average value of just over $9.5 million. When it expired at the end of the 2020-21 season, he re-upped for another five seasons at $9.5 million a year.

After his entry-level contract expired, Crosby elected to go with a five-year bridge deal that matched his uniform number, with a cap hit of $8.7 million a year. He then signed an extension for an additional 12 years at the same number — making the two-time Hart Trophy winner and two-time playoff MVP significantly underpaid relative to his peers for a good chunk of his career.

With one year remaining on that deal after this season, Crosby will be eligible to sign an extension on July 1.

That raises a question that was practically unthinkable as recently as last summer, but now it has to be asked: will he re-up with the only organization he has ever known? Or, could he look to ply his trade elsewhere as the Penguins try to get their house in order and get back into playoff contention?