ARLINGTON, VA — The famous gap in Alex Ovechkin's smile has widened.
A night after catching a stick up high near the mouth against Chicago on Saturday, Ovechkin showed up at Sunday's session with a cracked front incisor.
On top of the unplanned dentistry, that same stick also opened noticeable gashes along his bottom lip.
The harm came in the opening minutes of Saturday's third frame, as Chicago blueliner Louis Crevier jabbed at his face. To Ovechkin's bloodied frustration, no penalty was whistled on the sequence.
For roughly two decades, that toothy smile has served as a defining feature of his image, surfacing on items as varied as bobbleheads and a breakfast cereal, plus a Washingtonian cover that ran alongside a story on locating a quality dentist.
As it turns out, this latest mouth wound arrived just 48 hours before an arena-wide handout built around the tooth he lost. Each attendee at Monday's date with Anaheim is set to receive a floss dispenser modeled on Ovechkin, with the strand emerging via the opening in his grin.
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Ovechkin had loved the keepsake when it was first revealed in October, praising it as a handsome guy sporting "unbelievable" lettuce.
That gap dates to the fifth of October in 2007, when, facing the Atlanta Thrashers, he once more took a stick up around the face. Once Washington's training staff removed the leftover piece of tooth, he required 14 stitches; he would go on to tell the Washington Post's Dan Steinberg that the missing-tooth look suited him.
Back at that time, Ovechkin said the look made him seem hot, that women liked it, and that it lent him a warrior vibe.
Yet after Saturday's encounter with Crevier, those dispensers might already be out of date. Bench boss Spencer Carbery told reporters on Sunday that he wasn't sure whether Ovechkin intended to hold onto the larger gap.
Carbery said he hadn't raised the matter with his captain, and added that he couldn't even be sure it was a real tooth, given that such chips often involve artificial teeth that break and are subsequently replaced. He wrapped up by saying he was uncertain whether the original was involved and would have to check.
A look back through past coverage shows the freshly broken tooth was artificial, having first chipped amid Washington's title run in 2018. Prior reporting indicates it probably gave out during the opening game of that Final, played against Vegas. That autumn Ovechkin repaired the incisor, but he chose to preserve his signature front-tooth gap.
Plainly, considering how things played out the previous time Ovechkin shattered that tooth, Saturday's mishap has to count as a lucky sign.