It was a hockey player, but a strange one. He possesses explosive speed, an equally dynamic shot, the ability to drive Colorado Avalanche defencemen through the glass and pucks into the net while prostrate, Ringo Starr's haircut from 1963, a double-black-diamond ski slope for a nose and a disarming smile through which he tells bad jokes in two languages. Witnesses in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, were initially confounded by the subject's sudden appearance, but investigators were able to identify him as Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals. Naturalists were mystified how such a creature made it to the West Coast to play the Vancouver Canucks tonight at GM Place, but the migration was apparently caused by an imbecilic, short-sighted National Hockey League schedule that calls for players from the Eastern Conference to be spotted in each Western city only once every three years.