00:00Alex Ovechkin announced this is going to be his final season.
00:03And I think multiple things can be true on this.
00:05I don't think it's really a surprise, right?
00:07I mean, there was some real debate
00:08if he was going to come back in the first place.
00:11But it's also just a huge seismic event in Washington.
00:17Zabe, I don't know if you agree with this,
00:18but when I was a kid,
00:25I knew like two kids that played hockey in high school.
00:28Shout out to Eddie Evans.
00:30J.T. Burton.
00:31They were big hockey guys.
00:32The two guys you knew in high school.
00:34There were others.
00:34I was being a huge hockey town where it's like,
00:36I knew two guys.
00:37But like when I was a kid,
00:40most kids didn't play hockey.
00:42It was like a highly sectored,
00:45like your dad played hockey or you belong,
00:47maybe if you grew up going to Chevy Chase Club,
00:49they have this hockey program, which is incredible,
00:51but it was like a very narrow piece of the pie.
00:54And Alex Ovechkin in this town has completely changed hockey,
00:59completely, radically, dramatically changed the popularity of hockey.
01:03Had we not already become a hockey town before Ovee to a certain extent?
01:09I mean, the Caps did make a run to the Stanley Cup final.
01:11So I feel like I'm a good test case of that
01:13because that final run where they got swept by the Red Wings,
01:17I think was my junior or senior year of high school.
01:2197.
01:22Okay.
01:22So it was a little earlier.
01:23I thought it was 99.
01:24Okay.
01:2499.
01:25I could be wrong.
01:26Late 90s.
01:27But it was really cool and you were into it.
01:30And maybe if they had won, it would have crossed over.
01:33But like it did not at all provide the groundswell of people caring about hockey
01:41outside of the hockey crowd that the arrival of Ovee did almost right away.
01:47I'm not dismissing in any way the grade 8's impact on people's affection for
01:53and participation in hockey in this town.
01:56It's been significant.
01:58However, I do think it was kind of building before that.
02:00Now, I go way back because when I was in high school,
02:05I would go to games out in Landover with my buddy Andy Janowiak
02:09who had a green Pontiac GTO that we made sure to get our homework done early.
02:13He had season tickets because his parents were, you know,
02:16they had money for hockey tickets.
02:17We'd drive on out there.
02:19We'd stop at the Popeyes that was in Lanham to get some chicken before the game.
02:24I got chicken in England.
02:25Yeah.
02:26And I would be there going like crazy for Mike Gartner, Bobby Carpenter,
02:31Rod Langway, et cetera.
02:32So I go way back with the Capitals.
02:33But I didn't play ice hockey because it was not in our family's budget
02:38and or my mom was like, I am not driving you to a rink somewhere far away
02:42at 5 a.m.
02:44It's just not happening.
02:45But I would like organize street hockey games on tennis courts
02:48at the community center because I did love hockey in that regard.
02:52So hockey started to grow a lot, obviously,
02:55once you got to the mid-90s and through the 2000s.
03:00Ovi took it next level.
03:02Agree with that.
03:02And what I can tell you now in this city, the amount of young kids,
03:07because I have young kids that are playing hockey, boys and girls,
03:12is a 70% increase from when I was a young kid.
03:15Correct.
03:15It's got to be so dramatic.
03:18And you're right that there are a zillion factors.
03:20I think the year hockey just had, and even if you go calendar year from the four nations
03:26through the end of the Olympics with the U.S. fistfighting Canada the whole time
03:31in four nations and then the U.S. beating Canada in the gold medal game,
03:35the kid scoring the goal with his teeth knocked out, like hockey's on the come up
03:41in a major way, right?
03:42But I think in this city, the question Stallion asks with Alex Ovechkin announcing
03:49this is going to be his final year, how do the Caps properly honor him?
03:53And I think some of that's going to be a tricky balancing act
03:55because I don't think Alex is going to want a whole retirement tour.
03:59He just doesn't strike me as that type of dude.
04:01Correct.
04:02I don't know the answer to that, Zabe,
04:04but I think whatever it is, it's almost not enough.
04:09Like, I think you build a statue.
04:12I think he's statue worthy.
04:15I agree.
04:16Now, statues in sports get to be very contentious.
04:19I've had many debates about this with Andy Polin and callers about, you know.
04:24And then, of course, you get some statues like outside Nats Park
04:27that were widely universally panned, like what the hell are these things?
04:31That was more the artistic design.
04:33Well, I know.
04:34I know.
04:35I think the players that got statues outside of Nats Park, statue worthy.
04:40Correct.
04:41I don't necessarily want to argue the design aspect.
04:44He deserves a statue.
04:46This is the same town that once had the Sean Taylor installation.
04:49So certainly the artistic vision cannot deliver on what it's intended.
04:55But statues are for a permanence of an athletic career or a coaching career
05:01that is going to stand the test of time.
05:03That's why when Robert got a statue at Baylor, I rolled my eyes.
05:08And again, this is not just me being...
05:10I'm a Heisman down there.
05:11Great.
05:12Did Gino Toretta get one of those at Miami?
05:15No, but Miami had a great football tradition.
05:17Has anybody else ever won the Heisman at Baylor?
05:19I'm asking that.
05:20Okay.
05:21See, this is what happens with statue debates.
05:24And then, of course, you've got the Jopas statue,
05:25which is currently residing in some garage somewhere that nobody wants to talk about.
05:30I would love a statue of Ovi.
05:33Yeah.
05:33Okay.
05:33The question is...
05:34There's only two questions about the Ovi statue.
05:38Where and how big?
05:40That's it.
05:41Where and how big?
05:42Have you seen the Tom Brady statue in New England?
05:45Yes.
05:45It's massive.
05:47Yes.
05:48So at least...
05:48But here's a wrinkle on that.
05:50Tom Brady has shown no desire to be part of the Patriots organization now that he's left.
05:56And he's kind of thrown some subtle shade at them.
06:00And some Patriot fans are like,
06:02Hey, man, you know, we was good up here with you.
06:05And you were the key part of it, but you weren't the only part of it.
06:08And why do you not want to come back for things now?
06:11So it gets dicey in that regard.
06:13I think Ovi's going to always be a Washingtonian of sorts.
06:19So I'm fine with a statue.
06:20The question is how big and where.
06:22How big and where.
06:23I've not seen the redo.
06:24What else can you do?
06:25Obviously, you retire the number.
06:27Period.
06:27Nobody else ever wears it.
06:28Period.
06:28And whatever you think the normal wait time is for that, you fast forward.
06:35You do it damn near immediately.
06:36You retire permanently eight in the rafters.
06:40I'd love to be able to build it so sneakily that nobody knows it's going to be there.
06:44And literally on his last home game, they're like, we turn your attention outside to the concourse.
06:49And they pull the sheet off of it.
06:52But there's no way to do that.
06:53What else can you do?
06:55Obviously, you would want to bring back and gather a number of hockey luminaries to honor him.
07:02Of course, Gretzky tagging along step by step by step, city by city was enough of a tribute unto itself,
07:09which I found to be very profound that Gretzky and company.
07:13I got to I got to catch on for the last, I don't know, five or six games of that
07:18ride.
07:18It was pretty damn cool.
07:19I think it's awesome.
07:21I think Wayno likes a tequila, too.
07:24Well, I'm sure he probably does like a little bit of that.
07:27So, I mean, you know, everything else can seem to fall short.
07:30I guess the question is how many different things are you going to do?
07:34You can have a bobblehead night.
07:35You can have a giveaway jersey night.
07:37You can have a greatest moments night with a special highlight reel and screening of whatever.
07:43There's a lot of things you can do.
07:45So much of it is dependent upon what has he told the team he'd prefer.
07:52I imagine he wants not a lot.
07:57Correct.
07:58I think whatever that last game of the year, I almost wonder, White Bryant, see if you can look it
08:03up on SeatGeek or something.
08:04I bet the prices are already.
08:06Yeah, they've skyrocketed.
08:07We went through this yesterday.
08:08They were up to $800 a pop.
08:10Specific to capital, I think OV warrants a statue.
08:15And you asked an interesting question, where does it go?
08:18I think it's important for these things to be outdoors and accessible to fans that aren't going to the game.
08:26Right?
08:27Like, I think you'd want it to be accessible year-round.
08:30Okay.
08:31But I've not been down there in a while now that they're redoing all.
08:35There's a lot of construction.
08:37I know there is.
08:38Will there be a general place to gather outside?
08:42I don't know, but I think you'd like it to be there.
08:46I'm sure in all the plans that have been released, we could probably track that stuff down.
08:51Have you been to Denver?
08:52Have you been to the Broncos' current stadium?
08:54No, I have not.
08:55I think they've done it the best.
08:57They've got a statue of Elway?
08:58What's that?
08:58They've got a statue of Elway?
09:00They have a statue of Elway.
09:02But then they also have this cool, gigantic statue of four or five actual Broncos kind of running together.
09:11And then there may be other ones.
09:13There may be other ones, too.
09:15But they also have what I assume is like whatever their equivalent of the Ring of Honor is.
09:22They have these brick walls with busts of all these great players.
09:28Bronze, busts.
09:28So like a Hall of Fame of sorts.
09:30And it's outdoors, outside of the stadium, and accessible.
09:34Fans could go there on a Wednesday afternoon.
09:36If you're a Commanders fan from Bristol, England, and you're flying to town,
09:41you could go to this open access area on Saturday before the game.
09:46I would like something like that for Ovechkin, where fans could just go and appreciate that thing
09:53without having to have a ticket to the game.
09:55I do worry, in a downtown Washington location, we've seen Ovechkin come out in his support of Vladimir Putin,
10:05whatever that was, two, three weeks ago.
10:08I do think he's going to live in Russia after this, and I don't know what all that will entail.
10:13I do fear the people that love to deface things on behalf of their political beliefs.
10:19Ooh, that's a good point.
10:20There will certainly be some idiots that want to do that.
10:24Now, ideally, you could put this in a location, whether you secure it or it closes at night or something.
10:30I don't know exactly.
10:32I hate for that to be the case.
10:33I do think that's a very minor.
10:34I would just hope they'd have good security cameras and that anyone, any jackass that think that that's going to
10:40solve anything,
10:40they get prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
