one of the greatest to ever do it<\/a>. But his best hockey is far beyond him. Still, he brings value on the scoresheet. A 30-goal season is definitely in the cards \u2013\u00a0the only time he didn\u2019t reach it was when he had 24 during the COVID-impacted 2020-21 campaign. He\u2019s the greatest goal-scorer ever, and if he feels he still has more to offer, he\u2019ll likely find a way to stick around. <\/p>\nUntil then, cue the speculation. During an interview on The Sheet with Jeff Marek and Greg Wyshynski, Capitals GM Chris Patrick discussed the idea of Ovechkin calling it a career during the summer instead of having a final farewell tour:<\/p>\n
Greg Wyshynski: \u201cI remember when I went to camp for the Caps much, much earlier in the season, there was the notion that this decision from Alex may not be \u2013\u00a0if he decides to do this, it may not be (like Wayne) Gretzky. It may not be like we find out with two weeks left in the regular season. It could be something that we find out in the offseason from Alex. What\u2019s the percentage chance that the season ends, the fans react as they do, but we don\u2019t hear anything official from Alex until the offseason?<\/p>\n
Chris Patrick: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to handicap a percentage chance, but I think that\u2019s definitely a possibility. You know, he has a process that he wants to go through. There are conversations he wants to have, both with his family and with his advisors, with (team owner Ted Leonosis), with (Capitals president of hockey operations Brian MacLellan), and with me. He\u2019s not going to rush to do it, he\u2019s going to do it on his timeline, and if that ends up being as we get towards the end of the season or if it spills into the offseason, I think he\u2019s going to do the process the way he wants to do it and we certainly are going to respect that.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can listen to the full episode below:<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alex Ovechkin is set to finish his five-year deal this summer \u2013 and as a 40-year-old, retirement is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-534357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}