The negotiation, such as it was, took less than 10 minutes, as best Alex Ovechkin could recall. No bean counters, no agents. Just the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer on one end of a transatlantic phone call and Washington Capitals General Manager Chris Patrick on the other. It had all the gravitas and back-room machinations of a teenager discussing with a parent how much he should get for mowing the lawn.
“I called Chris and said, ‘OK, let’s make a deal,’” Ovechkin said Monday during a news conference announcing his freshly signed, one-year contract. “And he said what’s gonna happen with the signing bonus and other bonuses. And I said, ‘OK, let’s go.’”
A couple months shy of his 41st birthday, Ovechkin didn’t make the decision last week to come back for a 22nd season with the Capitals because of the money. And on the other side, it’s not as if the Capitals were calling up every 30-goal scorer on the free agent market to see if they could talk one into signing an under-value contract for the 2026-27 season.