Alex Ovechkin has gone back and forth on how he wants to end his professional hockey career in recent years. The Washington Capitals captain hasn’t spoken a ton about retirement with the media but he has started opening up about it more as he approaches two full decades in the NHL.

“Still enjoy it,” Ovechkin said last October. “As soon as I’m not going to enjoy it, it’s probably not right for me to stay here and play the game the way I wanted to play.”

Just this last February, Ovechkin stated that he believed he would fully retire from the game once his NHL contract with the Capitals is up after the 2025-26 campaign. The statement contradicted his previous openness to ending his playing days with the team he started with, the KHL’s Dynamo Moscow.

Now, it appears The Great Eight is back thinking about eventually donning Dynamo’s blue and white again. He spoke about the possibility with RIA Novosti’s Andrey Senchenko on Sunday.

“I don’t look that far ahead,” Ovechkin said as translated by Google Translate. “I still have two years left on my NHL contract. Of course, I want to play my last game for Dynamo, where I started my career. But there’s no point in raising this topic right now.”

Ovechkin was brought up through Dynamo’s academy and played the first four years of his professional career with the club in what was then called the Russian Super League.

After joining the Capitals for the 2005-06 NHL season, Ovechkin has remained active in an alumni setting with Dynamo and even returned to play for the team during the 2012-13 NHL lockout.

Outside of attempting to win another Stanley Cup, the biggest unchecked box left in Ovechkin’s NHL career concerns the all-time goals record still held by Wayne Gretzky. The big Russian winger is just 41 goals away from tying The Great One for the top spot on the list.

Ovechkin has two years remaining on his deal with Washington, providing him up to 164 games to secure the record. If he can’t track down Gretzky within those two years, he hasn’t committed to signing on for additional years to score more goals.

“I don’t like the word ‘if’,” Ovechkin said in February. “We live today, we play, we move on.”