great eight

Ovechkin is right.  I am wrong.

Time for a slice of crow.  Olympic rules state that an athlete must be a citizen of the country they play for.

crow on plate

The Russian men’s hockey team is now out of the competition.  That means Alex Ovechkin, the leader of Team Russia heads back to the United States.  Putin’s dream of a gold medal in men’s hockey has gone down in defeat.   To a non-hockey fan, this news is a blip on my radar, sort of.

I say sort of because I have a granddaughter who is wild about everything Ovechkin.  I follow him through default.  Maybe I could go so far as to call it osmosis.  Whatever the reason, I am just plain old pissed at the toothless wonder, the Great 8.  I am pissed at him because he is a turn coat.  He should have never played for Team Russia.  He should have never worn the number 8 jersey while playing for Russia.

Mr. Howler defended #8.  He said, “Well, he IS Russian!”  Tough.  He was drafted by the Washington Capitals in 2004 and began playing in 2005 at age 20.  It’s now 2014.  For ten years Alex Ovechkin has been playing for the Washington Capitals.  He has been making good old American money and lots of it. He is their star.

Brief history on Ovechkin, straight out of Wiki tells us that his mother holds two gold medals as a basketball star.  He grew up in a high rise in a not so great neighborhood and wanted an out so he poured all his talent into ice hockey.  He got noticed by international teams as a teenager and was drafted by the Caps around 2004.  He is one lucky Russian, if you ask me.  He has made millions of American dollars.

Ovechkin needed to ‘dance with the one who brung ya’ in my opinion.  He has made his fortune here, totaling over $56,000,000.  That’s a nice little capitalist egg nest.  His 2013-2014 salary is over $9.5 million dollars per freaking year!   Alex, son, those are dollars, not rubles.

Ovechkin would be playing hockey for the gold had he played for Team USA.  I laugh at his defeat.  Dance with the one who brung ya, Ovechkin.  Stay loyal, if not to new country, then at least to the almighty dollar.  I hope there is no welcome home parade.

19 Thoughts to “Ovechkin heads home to the USA”

  1. Lyssa

    Then you must be angry with most NHL players and just give it up 🙂

  2. Rick Bentley

    Moon, this happens in basketball as well. There are no hard feelings by fans towards any athlete who goes and plays for his country – for free, mind you. The minor sin an athlete can do is to skip out on playing for his country, to say “there’s no money in this, I’ll rest my body”.

    A more major sin is to go pay-for-play. I haven’t heard of this in men’s sports. But in women’s basketball it’s happening once in a while. There are a couple of WNBA players who are good, but not great enough to make the US Olympic team – Becky Hammon is one. Meanwhile, most WNBA players play overseas during the winter, where they make two or three times more in pay than they do for the WNBA season. Russia is one lucrative place for stars to play. The Russian club that employs Hammon told her that they would offer her a very large deal (I think towards a million dollars) if and only if she gained Russian citizenship, so that she could play on their Olympic team. And she did this. And there are players and fans in the WNBA that feel bitterly about this. The choice to change your citizenship for the sake of money.

    That’s kid of what you want Ovechkin to do. It’d make his people in Russia angry with him, for sure.

    If you want to be mad at him about not becoming a US Citizen, that’d be one thing. Who he plays for in the Olympics is an offshoot of that.

  3. Lyssa

    How does the NBA and WNBA pay compare?!!! And why isn’t it MNBA and WNBA!

  4. punchak

    Olympic Games are all about playing for your own country every four years!
    I follow the Caps / whether they’re up or down. Not a total Ovie fan, but
    he’s fun to watch.

  5. Rick Bentley

    The WNBA pay is not high. I think each team can pay their top star as much as $110,000 or so (for about 5-6 months work). Most players make about half of that. By contrast the NBA contracts range from $440,000 a year to about 20 million a year (for about 9 months work).

    And most of the women make additional income playing overseas. Privately-owned “clubs” in Russia, Turkey, China, Isreal, and other places pay them 2-3 times what they make for a season in the US, and as much as a million a year for a handful of players.

  6. Rick Bentley

    The WNBA doesn’t make a lot of money. If you go to a Mystics game, there are a few thousand people in there. And TV money is negligable. It aims to be self-sustaining, and is close I think. As they are associated with the NBA, they have that backbone to lean on – most teams’ organizations are colocated in an NBA team’s facility, and they have a built-in stadium and staff to use.

    The WNBA isn’t aiming to make money. It primarily aims to give female players a forum to play in, so that they can be seen as role models of a sort to young girls, or anyone else. The players are aboit “grinding”, working continuously and trying to be the best one can be; they’re pretty good role models I think.

    (I do enjoy the WNBA. I always did enjoy watching women play basketball. It seems normal to me; I like women, and I like basketball).

    An interesting aspect of the WNBA is the sexuality of the players. About half of them are gay, and they don’t hide it. You can look any team’s roster up on Twitter and figure out quickly who is gay or straight. Except, the star players keep matters relatively private; presumably, it affects endorsement potential. For the most part they are out living life as they see fit. The WNBA used to be in spasms about how to market the game to a “wider audience”, focused on the most attractive players. They’ve changed; they’re not aspiring to mass appeal. They’re not marketing themselves around attractiveness, but around basketball. The appeal is more around skills than pretty faces. It’s a commendable change.

  7. Rick Bentley

    The point I was trying to get at, as relates to the gay athlete issue : it’s just not an issue in the WNBA. The WNBA used to have a few (religious-minded) players grumbling about being surrounded by lesbians. But you don’t hear it anymore. Nobody cares; nobody hits on one another in the shower. Thers’s no issue.

  8. Lyssa

    After hounding Moon over this we discovered she had overlooked one little rule of the Olympic Charter. Rule 41 states that athletes must hold citizenship in the country for which they compete. Oh, and she agreed not to call for him to give up his Russian citizenship.

    1. I will eat humble crow once I get home.

  9. Rick Bentley

    Right; that’s the rule. There have been athletes who became American citizens so as to play for America, out of appreciation for the opportunity they had here – Hakeem Olujuwon did that. But when an athlete comes from a country with a strong sports program that nurtured them, i.e. Russia and hockey, it’d be a big deal if they didn’t come back to play for that country.

  10. punchak

    One American who won gold but not for the US but for Russia. Vic Wild became
    a Russian citizen in 2011 by marrying a Russian snowboarder and moved to Moscow.
    Says he would never have reached the gold medal had he stayed with the USSA (the
    U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association). You can read abt him in today’s Post.

  11. Lyssa

    Moon-howler :
    I will eat humble crow once I get home.

    Don’t. Just don’t root for Sydney Crosby. Full redemption. Just ask your family expert. Oh and be sure to watch tomorrow at noon!!!!!

    1. Oh dear God, I have already gotten the lecture on rooting for Crosby also. Are you in collusion with my granddaughter?

      I fully confess to not being an ice hockey fan.

      I apologize to Ovechkin. Sorry Sorry Sorry.

  12. Lyssa

    @Moon-howler

    Kindred spirits. Women lost to Canada.

  13. Still picking feathers out of my teeth. Crows are tough old birds. Hard to chew.

    Ovechkin is welcome back into the howler gene pool.

    Sorry Ovie!!!!

  14. Scout

    see editorial in today’s Washington Post.

    1. I hope you guys don’t expect me to eat any more crow….I have crow indigestion!!!

  15. punchak

    @Scout
    Ovie is staying in Russia due to his father’s heart condition,
    which he didn’t know about until after he had finished the losing game.

    Speaking of which / How delicious for the Finns to beat the Russians at home!
    Thinking of the Finnish winter war of 1939, when big Russia invaded Finland
    usurped a part of it. That’s supposedly when the Molotov cocktail was invented.
    Finland was under the thumb of USSR until its breakup. For Finland to beat
    the Russians at home must feel soooo gooood!!!

  16. Lyssa

    Everyone likes beating the Russians. Lake Placid 1980….. 🙂 but I get the Finnish victory.

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