Alex Ovechkin was crestfallen when he learned that his good friend and longtime Washington Capitals teammate Nicklas Backstrom would be stepping away from the team.
“I was in shock,” Ovechkin told reporters. “He’s my friend, he’s my teammate and to see how emotional it is, it’s a tough situation … Me and him played together since Day One, and it’s kind of hard to see what’s happening right now.”
Me and him. Butch and Sundance. Ovechkin and Backstrom — more than 1,000 games together as Capitals teammates since Backstrom joined the team in 2007.
“It’s very rare, and we’re very fortunate to be in the same organization for this long,” Backstrom told The Washington Post in March 2022. “We know everything about each other inside out. Just very fortunate to play like this for this long.”
I’d say they are joined at the hip, but it is exactly that — Backstrom’s surgically repaired left hip — that is now keeping them apart. It’s not responding as everyone hoped, and after an attempt to come back from 2022 surgery, Backstrom came to the conclusion that he can’t be on the ice with his teammates — for now, at least, but possibly for good.
Capital general manager Brian MacLellan said Monday it was unlikely that Backstrom would return this season. “It’s emotional for everybody,” MacLellan told reporters. He’s been such a big part of the organization. It’s a tough situation, and eventually everybody’s got to move on.”
If it is time to move on, Backstrom, who will turn 36 later this month, will be able to look back on a standout National Hockey League career, possibly a Hall of Fame one. He is the Capitals leader in career assists (762) and second in points (1,033) to Ovechkin.
He was not ready to call it a career.
“The best thing I want to do is play hockey, and that’s my life,” Backstrom said in May. “Obviously, I want to be back. I want to be back to normal, not worrying about this. We’ll see what’s going to happen.”
What he thought was going to happen was that he would return to the ice to play with his teammates. He was looking forward to playing this season. “I think a lot of us are really excited to be back,” Backstrom said before the season began. “We’re disappointed about last year. We also don’t want to miss playoffs. That’s not acceptable. I think I see a lot of fire in guys in the locker room and how we approach this season. I think it’s going to be an important year.”
It’s an important year, but not for the reasons Backstrom hoped.
He will have his 2018 Stanley Cup championship ring to put on his finger when those melancholy moments of a career ending earlier than he had hoped sweep over him.
I always felt that no one in that Capitals locker room took their annual Stanley Cup playoff failures harder than Backstrom. I know it weighed heavily on Ovechkin, whose legacy, without that title, would be defined by what he didn’t accomplish rather than what he did.
But Backstrom would sit there in front of his locker after every elimination game painfully searching for answers. “I expect the same questions over and over again when you lose,” Backstrom said after their loss in Game 7 to Pittsburgh in 2017.
The questions changed the following year when Washington finally broke through and hoisted the Stanley Cup trophy. After Ovechkin made his celebratory skate around the ice at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas holding the Cup high, he handed it off to Backstrom.
When Ovechkin scored his 800th career goal in December 2022, Backstrom was recovering from his hip operation and couldn’t be on the ice with him. But he was there in the locker room after the game to share a beer and a hug. He had been there for nearly all of Ovechkin’s goals and assisted on nearly 35% of them.
Now Ovechkin, 38, will have to pursue Wayne Gretzky’s record of 894 career goals without his partner on the ice for so many years. It was already a tough task — the Russian star has just two goals in the first 10 games, leaving him 70 behind Gretzky.
“The league and game itself will lose a lot if he (Backstrom) doesn’t continue to play,” Ovechkin told Russian television last year.
Ovechkin may lose the most.
You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.