The Caps picked Ovechkin first overall in the 2004 draft, but because a labor dispute led to the cancellation of the following season, he didn’t join the team until 2005. In his very first game, he scored two goals and checked an opponent into the boards so hard that a support holding up the Plexiglas at the end of the rink was knocked out. But despite Ovechkin’s presence, his rookie season was another dismal one for the Caps, who finished with a losing record and in the basement of their division. In November 2007, the team hired a new coach, Bruce Boudreau, a likable, schlubby, moon-faced man who is in many ways the epitome of old-time Canadian hockey culture — a lifer who spent most of his career until then playing and then coaching in the minors, where he was sometimes known as Dirt, for his lack of hygiene. But Boudreau quickly instituted an aggressive, up-tempo style that perfectly suited Ovechkin, and he was smart enough to let Ovie be Ovie, even if that meant letting him skate longer shifts than his linemates. “At first I was a little bit in awe — I had to keep pinching myself,” Boudreau told me before the Olympics. “Every night the guy does something that will wow you. He may not have a great game every time, but if he’s not scoring, he’s hitting, and if he’s not hitting, he’s scoring.”

The closest Boudreau has come to criticizing his franchise player was last December, when he gently suggested that Ovechkin might want to rein himself in a bit. This was after Ovechkin, who once said of himself, “Russian machine never breaks,” injured his shoulder in a shoving match with a player from the Columbus Blue Jackets — the kind of meaningless ritual combat that on most teams the designated bully takes care of — and missed six games. Then, a week or so after returning, he received a two-game suspension for an illegal hit on the Hurricane’s Tim Gleason, and it appeared that he might once again have hurt himself.

Ovechkin’s response to his injury, and to the reminder that Eric Lindros, who also played the game with overwhelming physicality, ended his career with a spate of concussions, was to say, “It is what it is.” This is a catchphrase he uses a lot, which seems to combine Russian fatalism with an unwillingness to indulge in speculation. At the Verizon Center, right after the injury, he also repeated another Ovechkinism, one he employs even more often: “I cannot change.” “Everybody has to have his own style, his own game,” he told me a few weeks later. “Everybody has to be himself. I’m listening to nobody. I have my own mind, my own heart.”

In a hockey culture that encourages discipline and self-effacement, Ovechkin is a free spirit and even a bit of a showoff. For the playoffs last year, he died his hair red. To celebrate one of his scores he sometimes hurls himself into the glass. After that miraculous goal against Montreal, he put his hand to his ear, encouraging the fans to cheer louder, and after scoring his 50th goal of the season against Tampa Bay in March 2009, he dropped his stick to the ice as if it were too hot to handle — antics that drive old-guard types like Don Cherry, the former Bruins coach who is now a commentator on “Hockey Night in Canada,” to distraction.

Invariably, Ovechkin’s critics wind up comparing him with Crosby, who is younger than Ovechkin but entered the N.H.L. at the same time. Crosby is probably the second-best player in the world right now, but before Ovie came along he had already been anointed No. 1. Wayne Gretzky, a k a the Great One, dubbed Crosby “the Next One,” and the label was not inappropriate. Crosby, smaller and less physical than Ovechkin, plays a little like Gretzky, with the same ability to anticipate a play and to seemingly see behind his head. And he has Gretzky’s personality: he’s a straight arrow, shy, polite, circumspect. Unlike Ovechkin, who enjoys the limelight, Crosby is visibly uncomfortable with it. He has mastered an earnest, dutiful sound-bite style of talking to reporters but seldom jokes with them the way Ovechkin does and would never dream of hotdogging after a goal.

Because they’re such opposites, the yin and yang of their sport — or the Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, as commentators so often point out — the media keep hoping for a full-blown personal rivalry. Crosby and Ovechkin have clashed on the ice numerous times, most notably in the playoffs last year, which seemed to bring out the best in both, especially in Game 2, in which each of them scored a hat trick. This year’s Olympics have to be considered a wash, because until he scored that goal against the United States, Crosby, too, had had a disappointing tournament. He sometimes seemed to be invisible, or else playing a skilled, puck-control game that more nearly resembled that of the Europeans than his smash-mouth compatriots. In their early N.H.L. clashes this year, Ovie clearly had the edge, but then regular-season games mean much less than the playoffs. The two teams will most likely meet again in the next few weeks.

Ovechkin claims any suggestion of bad blood between them has been exaggerated by the press, but they have clearly begun to get on each other’s nerves. If Ovechkin owns the 2006 Calder Memorial Trophy, the rookie-of-the-year award that Crosby was seemingly destined for, Crosby has something even more valuable: his name is on a Stanley Cup, and he has an Olympic gold medal. Crosby has complained about Ovechkin’s goal celebrations, which he says are disrespectful. Ovechkin has called Crosby a whiner. Yet he has included a Crosby stick in a collection he has been assembling of sticks owned by the players he most admires. “I love watching him,” he told me. “Except when we’re on the ice together, and then he’s not one of my favorites.”