Washington Capitals president of hockey operations Brian MacLellan is the latest to share his belief that Alex Ovechkin will play his age-40 season in the NHL next year. MacLellan and general manager Chris Patrick sat down for their annual post-mortem on the season Monday, and the Caps former GM was directly asked if the legendary winger would be back in a Caps sweater.
“Yeah,” MacLellan responded simply.
The 2025-26 campaign is the last on the five-year contract that Ovechkin signed with the Capitals in 2021. MacLellan was less sure, though, about whether the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer would be sticking around for longer than that one year. Ovechkin is eligible for an extension on July 1.
“I think we’ve learned with him to leave possibilities open all the time,” MacLellan said. “I think he had a fun year this year. He really enjoyed himself. The team had a lot of fun together and was successful, and I think he’ll come back, and we’ll see where it goes from there. Hopefully, he has another good year.”
Ovechkin himself wasn’t sure how much more he had left in the tank beyond next season during his Breakdown Day media availability on Saturday. As MacLellan theorized, the Caps captain left that up to how well the year goes.
“Be honest (with) you, I haven’t thought about it yet, but we’ll see what’s going to happen,” Ovechkin said. “Obviously, I’m going to try to do my best to be able to do well next year, and we’ll see.”
In his age-39 season, Ovechkin scored 44 goals in 65 games, the most ever by a player 39 years or older. The 0.68 goal-per-game rate, his highest scoring rate in a season since 2010, would have seen him score 56 goals in a fully healthy year.
Ovechkin achieved that level of offensive success despite playing, on average, the lowest ice time per game (17:43) of his career. He saw even less time during the postseason (17:01), no longer helping the team close out games in empty-net situations.
“I think having spoken with him a little bit here after the season, I think he’s pretty aware of where he is in his career, and being 40 next year,” Patrick said. “Not many guys have played in this league at that age, let alone scored as many goals as he has in a season. So I think him and Carbs, they have a great relationship, and they can be open and honest with each other, and I think they’ll be hopefully on the same page with usage and role going forward.”
Carbery already severely limited Ovechkin’s role from a zone-start standpoint this past season, starting him in the offensive zone 91.3 percent of the time. Among all NHL skaters to have played at least 200 five-on-five minutes, Ovechkin ranked first by 3.8 percent. Second and third in the rankings were Ovechkin’s teammates Hendrix Lapierre (87.5 percent) and linemate Dylan Strome (87.4 percent).
After completing his primary aim of passing Gretzky for the league’s goals record, Ovechkin will head into next year three goals shy of becoming the first NHL player ever to hit 900 career goals. He is also just 26 goals shy of scoring 1,000 career goals in the regular season and playoffs combined.
