After landing at Dulles Airport yesterday, Alex Ovechin returned to Kettler Capitals Iceplex Tuesday morning to join several Capitals teammates in initial preparations for the 2017-2018 season. Ovechkin showed no signs of jet lag and looked like he was in great shape as he enters his 13th season in the NHL.

Other Capitals players on the ice this morning at Kettler included: Evgeny Kuznetsov, Dimitry Orlov, Philipp Grubauer, Lucas Johansen, Connor Hobbs, Jonas Siegenthaler, Vitek Vanecek, Nathan Walker and Sam Anas, Minnesota Wild prospect from Maryland.

Ovechkin showed a lot of speed this morning on his drives to the net.

Ovi already practicing the breakaway pic.twitter.com/3tMk698e0t — NoVa Caps (@NoVa_Caps) August 29, 2017

Especially on the breakaway.

Defense by Ovi as he intercepts a pass towards the end of this clip pic.twitter.com/LpdYtx9hOw — NoVa Caps (@NoVa_Caps) August 29, 2017

Ovechkin also showed some great defense.

Ovi with some puck work between two defenders and a nice backhand pass pic.twitter.com/16aXhRV0aH — NoVa Caps (@NoVa_Caps) August 29, 2017

And some solid puck control between two defenders.

Ovechkin had quite the offseason. He met soccer legend Pele, dressed up as Darth Vader in a commercial for charity and married his fiance Nastasiya.

Ovechkin is coming off a rough season in which he scored just 33 goals. For other players, 33 goals is a good number but for a superstar who’s scored at least 40-50 goals in all but two seasons excluding last year, it can be abnormal.

A slim Ovechkin returned to Kettler today. Hear what his teammates had to say about their cut captain. https://t.co/eZOg7GT2iK pic.twitter.com/Eg0HuS9umc — CSN Capitals (@CSNCapitals) August 29, 2017

Being at Kettler on the 29th day of August, this was one of the earlier times Ovechkin has reported to D.C. He usually arrived the weekend before training camp starts in seasons past. As a 31 year-old Ovechkin showed no signs of aging this morning and Tarik El Bashir over at CSN confirmed from Evgeny Kuznetsov that he appears slimmer. Now that he’s back on the ice working out, he won’t be out of shape anytime soon.

Ovechkin did not speak to the media today, but he certainly appeared slimmer–a fact Kuznetsov confirmed. #Caps — Tarik El-Bashir (@TarikCSN) August 29, 2017

We got more from this morning at Kettler later today.

By Michael Marzzacco

Follow @marswaggo

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