Those 13 years went by in a hurry, and the time for Ovechkin to sign just the third contract of his NHL career is here. Today, the Caps captain signed a five-year extension worth a total of $47.5 million; the deal carries an annual salary cap hit of $9.5 million, just a shade below the $9.538 million cap hit of his prior 13-year deal. Ovechkin himself broke the news of the extension with an Instagram post.
Nearly three quarters ($34.5 million) of Ovechkin's compensation in his contract extension is made up of signing bonuses. His actual salary for each of the first three years of the deal is $1 million; the salary portion of his compensation will climb to $5 million annually for the final two years of the pact.
If not for an expansion draft last week, the Caps likely would have signed their captain to a contract extension last summer. But holding off and waiting until the Seattle Kraken conducted its expansion draft last Wednesday enabled the Caps to protect an additional forward from the upstart Kraken.
Seventeen years ago, the Caps won the NHL's draft lottery and the right to claim Ovechkin with the first choice in the 2004 NHL Entry Draft. Weeks after his 20th birthday, Ovechkin made his NHL debut and scored a pair of goals in his first NHL game, victimizing the Columbus Blue Jackets and goaltender Pascal Leclaire. Those were the first of 52 goals he would score in his rookie season of 2005-06, a campaign that culminated with Ovechkin winning the Calder Trophy as the League's top rookie. Of the 40 players who suited up for Washington and Columbus in that Oct. 5, 2005 contest in the District, Ovechkin is the only one who is still active in the NHL.
Ovechkin has won nine Rocket Richard Trophies during his 16 seasons in the League, and he is one of only seven players in NHL history to play their first 16 seasons with the same team while playing in 96.6 percent or more of their team's regular season games. His unique combination of goal-scoring prowess and durability has enabled him to score 730 goals in his 16 seasons in the NHL, sixth on the League's all-time list. Ovechkin is two goals shy of moving past Marcel Dionne (731) for fifth on that ledger, and he is now 165 goals away from Wayne Gretzky's all-time career standard of 894 goals.
If Ovechkin is able to average 33 goals per season over the life of his five-year extension, he'll pass Gretzky for the top spot on the list.
The Caps captain is already Washington's all-time leader in goals, games played (1,197) and points (1,320). In the history of pro sports in D.C., only two players have played as many as 20 seasons here. Washington Senators pitcher Walter Johnson put in 21 seasons here from 1907 through 1927, and Washington Football Team cornerback Darrell Green played 20 seasons in the District from 1983 through 2002.
Ovechkin is the greatest goal scorer of his era; since his career began in 2005-06, he has scored 244 more goals than the next closest player (Pittsburgh's Sidney Crosby, 486) over that same time span. Although he began his NHL career in '05-06, he leads all NHL players in goals since the start of the 1992-93 season, more than a decade before his career got underway.
The longest running show in Capitals franchise history has produced countless highlight reel goals and plays over the years, along with a Stanley Cup championship in 2018. With the contract extension taken care of and much of the team's core still in place from the '17-18 championship season, Ovechkin and the Caps will take aim on another Cup or two in the next half decade.
