Whos Is Alexander Ovechkin?
Alexander Mikhaylovich
Ovechkin(Russian: Алекса́ндр Миха́йлович Ове́чкин;
born September 17, 1985 in Moscow, USSR), is a professional ice hockey
left winger for the Washington Capitals of the National Hockey League.
He currently resides in Arlington, Virginia. He was the number on pick
in the 2004 NHL Entry Draft, but due to the 2004-05 lockout he only
started playing in the 2005-06 NHL season.
Ovechkin is known for his amazing ability to
score from superiorly tough
angles. Alexander Ovechkin is the son of Mikhail Ovechkin, a former
professional football (soccer)player and Tatyana
Ovechkina,
who won two Olympic gold medals while competing for the Soviet
basketball team
in the 1976 Summer Olympics at Montreal
and in 1980
at Moscow. He began playing hockey
at the age of eight. Soon after he began, however,
he had to postpone his hockey career because his parents were unable to
take
him to the rink. One of
Ovechkin's coaches saw his talent and communicated to
his parents that he should continue to play hockey. Ovechkin's older
brother,
Sergei, who later died in a car accident, saw that Alexander
loved hockey and
insisted that he be allowed to
return. Ovechkin did not start playing again for
almost two years.
Ovechkin began playing in the Dynamo
Moscow
system from the very start. In Russia, unlike in North America, hockey
teams
build players in their systems
from childhood. Of course since the fall of theSoviet Union the players always have the option of
which team they play for, but
teams
encourage players to stay in the system and hope that some of those
players
will eventually reach
the Russian Superleague,
the best hockey
league in Russia (and also considered the second best league in the
world
after
the NHL). Over the years
Ovechkin worked his
way up ranks of the Dynamo system and at
the age of 16 he made his
debut for Dynamo Moscow in the Russian Superleague in
the 2001-2002 season. In the 2003-2004 season, at the , he
won
the award for Best Left Wing in
the Superleague and was the youngest player in the history of Dynamo
Moscow to
lead the team in scoring. In
2004-2005, an ongoing shoulder injury sustained in the Gold Medal Game
against Canada in the World Junior Championships caused him to miss
nearly two
months of play.