The NHL's Global Ambitions Are a Farce While It Ignores Ovechkin's Geopolitical Ties
Opinion: The league cannot claim to be a global leader in sport while its greatest goalscorer openly aligns himself with the pro-Putin United Russia party.
The NHL loves to talk about growth and the globalization of its brand, but as The Guardian first reported, there is a glaring hole in that narrative. The league continues to look the other way while its most prolific star, Alex Ovechkin, serves as a mouthpiece for one of the most controversial regimes on earth.
Ovechkin, the Washington Capitals star and the NHL's all-time leading goalscorer, has appeared in a campaign advertisement for the United Russia party, the political organization supporting Vladimir Putin. Images published by the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti show Ovechkin alongside key Kremlin figures, including Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.
This is not a vague association. Ovechkin has a long history of support for Putin, including the launch of the "Putin Team" social movement in 2017. Even after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine—a war that has killed hundreds of thousands—the 40-year-old maintained that Putin was "my president."
From a hockey perspective, Ovechkin is an untouchable legend. Since being the first overall pick in 2004, he has led the Capitals to a 2018 Stanley Cup and surpassed Wayne Gretzky's scoring record in 2025 with his 895th goal. But the NHL is more than a statistics league; it is a global business.
By allowing Ovechkin to remain the face of the league's excellence while he actively campaigns for a pro-Putin party, the NHL signals that moral liabilities are irrelevant as long as the jerseys keep selling. If the league wants to be respected beyond the ice, it must stop treating these political affiliations as a private matter.