We were standing outside the visitors’ locker room at the Honda Center in Anaheim on Tuesday, where Alex Ovechkin had just answered a series of questions about how, at 36, he is off to the best start of his NHL career.
Ovechkin is the NHL’s reigning player of the week after scoring eight points in four games. This comes after he won October’s player-of-the-month award, ahead of the luminous Connor McDavid and the resurgent Frederik Andersen. Recently, Ovechkin passed Brett Hull to move into fourth place on the NHL’s all-time goalscoring list – he is currently at 742 — and if he keeps up even a reasonable facsimile of this pace, Jaromir Jagr, at 766, is within his sights at some point later in the season.
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But now we have shifted the conversation to the subject that’s really on people’s minds when it relates to Ovechkin: His latest television commercial venture.
Inquiring minds wanted to know, how did Ovechkin and long-time Capitals’ teammate Nicklas Backstrom end up in what is surely one of the smartest – and slyly written – ads of the year? It’s a commercial prepared for the insurance company MassMutual that runs about 30 seconds, and also features Ovechkin’s wife, Nastya, who delivers her lines in a steely, deadpan manner. All three play their parts well, but ultimately Nastya Ovechkin steals the show, something Alex is only too happy to discuss.
“She’s a model and she was here in L.A., in school to become an actress,” Ovechkin explained to me. “She loves doing that kind of stuff. Hopefully somebody’s gonna see it and they give her more commercial work.
“If she can, she’d be interested in that for sure.”
The NHL’s schedule may be back to normal this year, in terms of travel between Canada and the United States, but there does remain a great television divide between the two countries. It means Canadian viewers may not have seen Ovechkin’s commercial, whereas in the U.S., you can’t miss it.
According to Backstrom, the commercial was shot before the start of the season at a Capitals’ season-ticket holder’s home in Arlington, Va., near the team’s practice facility.
“Everything was very convenient and their house was great,” said Backstrom, in a telephone interview from Washington, where he is still rehabbing from offseason hip surgery.
Backstrom said he doesn’t eat much cereal normally and hasn’t touched any since shooting the commercial. But that day, he consumed a lot.
“Actually, the producer wanted me to say my line when I had cereal in my mouth, so there was a lot of cereal eating – and a lot of slurping milk, too.”
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Maybe the best part of the entire spot is what happens after Backstrom delivers his one-and-only line: The camera shifts to a table that features two photographs. One is from Ovechkin and Nastya’s wedding; the other is of Backstrom celebrating his 500th career assist, with Ovechkin leaning in, smiling. The wedding photo is significantly smaller – and clearly dwarfed by the larger enlargement of two long-time teammates, marking an important milestone in Backstrom’s career.
But Backstrom says: “My favorite part of the commercial is, no one expected me to be in there at the start. Then they just Zoom in on me – and it’s kind of like Ovie and Nastya having a normal conversation at home and all of a sudden, I’m showing up.”
Presumably, he’s not always over at the Ovechkins for breakfast?
“I’m not … but that day I was.”
David Abrutyn, Ovechkin’s marketing representative and a partner at Bruin Capital, said the original plan was to cast an actress to play the part of Alex’s wife, until he pointed out that Nastya Ovechkin is an actress herself. That solved one problem immediately.
MassMutual is an NHL corporate sponsor and last year, during the revamped schedule, had their name attached to the East Division.
“MassMutual wanted to focus on duos and the ability of duos to deliver a breakthrough message,” said Abrutyn, “and so they reached out to us. Obviously, we’re biased. I suppose there’s an argument to be made for Leon (Draisaitl) and Connor (McDavid) as the top duo, but when it comes to a body of work, I think Ovie and Backy and what they’ve done together, in terms of duos in the NHL, they’re right there.”
But Ovechkin has a long history of success in front of the camera, going back to his rookie season, when the NHL featured him in a spot with Sidney Crosby as the twin new faces of the game. Over the years, Ovechkin’s natural charisma just comes through whenever he’s trying to promote the game, which Abrutyn says is more necessary than ever given the financial challenges the pandemic has created in the business of hockey.
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“You can look back at the spots Alex has done over the years and it’s why he is who he is,” said Abrutyn. “To me, his ESPN late-night commercial is top five of the hundreds they’ve done – so creative. Alex just has an understanding of what that means from a marketing standpoint.”
It took only about half a day to shoot all the necessary raw footage for the MassMutual piece to come together.
“When you actually dissect the shots, there’s some wide-angle shots and closer-angle shots, and the way they put it together is, you have to shoot both running with dialogue,” said Abrutyn. “I think Alex ate an entire box of cereal and he had to have a mouthful of it when he was talking. There were a bunch of takes, but there’s not a huge reel of bloopers either.
“Credit to his wife too. No surprise – they came to the set prepared. It wasn’t like they were starting from scratch in terms of what the dialogue was.”
According to Backstrom, the project came together quickly. The NHLPA reached out to him, asked if he was willing to do it and when he said yes, he was sent a script. Within a week or two they started shooting.
“There were different versions, one longer, one shorter, but I think when I saw it, I gave the green light,” said Backstrom. “It was a funny script and personally I think it turned out pretty good. I don’t read too much on social media, but the people who’ve commented on it, so far, they all seem to love it. The feedback has been good.”
Ovechkin doesn’t get nervous in front of the camera, not before and not now.
“We basically just sit on the couch and you have to remember your line but – yeah it was pretty cool, pretty fun.
“If I don’t have fun, I’m not going to do it.”
The Olympic question
The NHL and the players association have up until Jan. 10 to pull out of the Olympics if COVID-19 outbreaks continue to force postponing games, as it did this past week with the Senators. Some owners would happily see that as a positive: A chance to bow out gracefully from an event they didn’t’ particularly want to attend in the first place and agreed to mostly as a means of getting a collective bargaining extension last summer. And it isn’t because they don’t want to see best-on-best competition, which has been absent from the international hockey schedule since the last World Cup back in 2016.
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But there is a fear that the players who’ll compete in the Olympics are also the key pieces of their NHL teams and that an Olympics played half a world away in China could have a negative effect on performance down the stretch. A reasonable take, and it made me wonder, did the decision to participate in previous Olympics have an impact on what happened once they were over?
For the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City and the 2010 Games in Vancouver, travel – and adjusting to time zones – wasn’t really an issue, and thus didn’t create the same levels of fatigue as the three others played overseas: 1998 in Nagano, 2006 in Turin and 2014 in Sochi.
If you look back at playoff results focused on just those three seasons, the answers are inconclusive. If you operate on the assumption that the best teams also, on average, produced the most Olympians, then the 1998 Red Wings managed a neat trick. They had a star-studded lineup that finished with the third-best regular-season record in the league and then went on to repeat as Stanley Cup champions.
It was a completely different story in 2006, however, where upsets were the order of the day once playoffs started, especially in the Western Conference, which saw the top four seeded teams (Detroit, Dallas, Calgary and Nashville) all lose in the opening round. The West’s No. 8 seed, Edmonton, ultimately made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final. It was a little more predictable in the East, where Ottawa had the best regular-season record but it was Carolina, the No. 2 seed, that eventually won it all.
In 2014, the NHL was still in midst of a six-year span where one of Chicago or Los Angeles won the Stanley Cup five times. That year, both the Blackhawks and Kings made it to the playoffs after only moderately successful regular seasons as the No. 3 teams in their respective divisions. The Kings ultimately emerged to defeat the Rangers in the final.
But that year, all six teams that managed 50 or more regular-season wins (Boston, Anaheim, San Jose, Pittsburgh, Colorado and St. Louis) had been eliminated by the time the Stanley Cup final was contested.
Meanwhile, the Islanders ended up at the bottom of the Metropolitan Division standings. Any hopes that they might have had for a push over the final third of the season evaporated when their best player, John Tavares, suffered a season-ending injury in Sochi.
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Injuries, naturally, can happen to any player at any time. No matter what a team might say publicly about that, privately, you know that’s their greatest fear of all here – that their Stanley Cup aspirations could be submarined by an injury that occurs in an international competition that owners were not all that keen to participate in, in the first place.
The Islanders watch
The Islanders have been decidedly un-Islanders-like, especially of late, losing four in a row to wrap up their team-record 13-game road trip to open the season. Starting Saturday, they’ll move into their new home, UBS Arena, with a game against the Flames.
I’ve argued this year’s version of the Flames, under coach Darryl Sutter, is trying to mimic the recent success the Islanders have had under Barry Trotz, becoming a team that’s first on the puck, heavy on the forecheck and just difficult to play against because they can wear you down over the course of a 60-minute game.
It helps too when you have sparkling goaltending: Calgary’s Jacob Markstrom recorded his fifth shutout of the season Thursday night, becoming just the 10th goaltender in history to manage that feat in 13 games or fewer from the start of the season, and just the fourth in the modern era. (The others: Pascal Leclaire, Bernie Parent and Brian Boucher). Markstrom’s back-up, Dan Vladar, also has a shutout this season, giving the Flames’ six shutouts in 17 games. That hasn’t been done, according to Sportsnet Stats, by any team since the 1938-39 Bruins.
So far, the Flames have executed the formula far better than the Islanders to date, but you won’t really get a read on the Islanders until they get settled in at home, get to play in front of their own fans and get back to a semblance of normal NHL life. Just the way they played the last four games – after playing reasonably well in the first nine – showed signs of weariness. But it won’t help that Ryan Pulock, their top defender, will miss four-to-six weeks with a lower-body injury after blocking a shot the other night. Or that team captain Anders Lee has joined long-time forward Josh Bailey on the COVID list, meaning he won’t be in the lineup for the opening of the new building.
Only a day before, Lee had spoken about how, if anyone deserves to be there for the opener, it was Bailey, an Islander since 2008-09. Instead, Bailey had to quarantine in Florida. Now, Lee is out too. So it’s patch-and-plug for now and hope to get on a roll, the way the 2014 Rangers did after opening that season with their own extended road trip because of building construction. The Rangers did eventually make it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, so that’s the good news. The bad news is, the way the divisions are shaping up, it looks as if there’ll ultimately be a clear divide between the top four and the bottom four teams, meaning it’s likely only four, not five, Metropolitan Division teams will be playoff bound. The Islanders are currently eighth, so a lot of ground to make up.
(Photo: Geoff Burke / USA TODAY Sports)
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