Darren Pang explains his Alex Ovechkin ‘one-trick pony’ comment

Darren Pang sparked outrage from Washington Capitals fans on Wednesday when he called Alex Ovechkin a “one-trick pony” during TNT’s coverage of the Capitals’ game against the New York Rangers.

“Well, I give Spencer Carbery and his coaching staff an awful lot of credit,” Pang said early in the broadcast. “We all know that Alex Ovechkin’s been a bit of a one-trick pony throughout his NHL career, but that has not been the case [this season].”

The perceived jab at the game’s greatest goal-scorer lit up social media to the point where you can no longer search Pang’s name without seeing a reference to the comment. The Capitals’ own X account referenced the controversy in their tweet of Ovechkin’s goal later in the game.

“One trick pony scores his 885th career goal and records his 1,599th career point,” they wrote.

Thursday, Pang explained his comments in an interview with 106.7 The Fan’s Sports Junkies.

Darren Pang: I didn’t hear anything about (the controversy) until just this morning. I always like clarifying things. The game moves very fast and I’m not sure exactly when someone thought that I said ‘one-trick pony’ but I will say this, we did a clip early in the game and I asked our producers there at TNT, I said, ‘Hey fellas why don’t you put together a clip, and people can watch this because it was very early in the game, of Ovi scoring in different areas of the ice.

[They] said, ‘That’s a great idea,’ and then we backed it up, we didn’t actually show it, but we backed it up with where he’s scored goals this year. And I said, ‘Let’s do that clip of him scoring in the slot, him scoring in front of the net, him scoring from his office – the one-timer that he scored, beautiful shot, against Edmonton [in the game] that I did. And then another one, a scramble in front of the net.

The point was, that he’s not a one-trick pony. I gave him a lot of credit for being flexible – that the coaching staff has convinced him to go to other areas of the ice, and look where he’s scoring goals from. Often in the past, just to clarify, a lot of us analysts or everybody else, talked about Ovi just going to the one side, the hash marks, in his office and then setting up the one-timer and often he was referred to ‘That’s a one-trick pony’ — one guy that gets the puck there and he fires it and scores goals.

What I was alluding to last night was how impressed I was with how flexible he’s been and that he’s not scoring from that same area all the time. Anyway, I’m not sure if that even clarifies.

Pang’s primary point of clarification seems to be that he was solely referring to goal-scoring, not speaking to any other part of Ovechkin’s game that Ovi may or may not have. He says the video package shown was an attempt to explain how Spencer Carbery has unlocked the Capitals’ captain in the offensive zone to score more goals from more areas on the ice.

However, Pang still doubles down on the central portion of his remarks that Capitals fans have taken exception to: that Ovechkin previously was a “one-trick pony” at one point of his career and only since Carbery’s 2023 hire has he adapted his game. The data shows that sort of conclusion has never been accurate.

While Ovechkin has undoubtedly scored many goals from his office in the left faceoff circle, he has historically found the back of the net from all over the offensive zone. The only type of goal that he’s never been credited for is a wraparound.

Heat map of Ovechkin goals (2009-2024)

Ovechkin, especially early in his career, was perhaps the most dynamic goal scorer the NHL had ever seen. He scored one-timers, he scored off the rush, he scored dangling through defenders, he scored at the netfront, he scored with his forehand, backhand, and everything in between. Heck, he even scored three shorthanded goals in his rookie season.

Pang was even an analyst for FSN Arizona when Ovechkin scored The Goal while laying on his back and not even looking at the net against the Phoenix Coyotes.

Later in the Sports Junkies interview, Pang explained himself further.

“It’s not easy to tell a legendary player that we’re not going to have you in that same spot every single time and we’re gonna have to have you moving around, you’re going to have to be a little more unpredictable,” Pang said. “That’s exactly the point I was making – that he wasn’t a one-trick pony, that he’s done a great job of moving around the ice.

“I think Caps fans, if they don’t see that he’s scoring goals from a lot of different areas, I don’t know what they’re watching because he’s clearly moving around the ice a lot more. I saw him score a goal from the middle of the ice, I saw him score a goal from the right side, I saw him score many goals from the slot, which I didn’t see a whole lot of those goals from that area before.”

Per IcyData, Ovechkin has scored 40 percent of his goals from either the low or high slot areas since 2009. He has scored just 20 percent of his goals from the area most would label his office.

While Pang may have just been trying to give one of the NHL’s brightest young coaching minds some credit in front of a national TV audience, he did so in a dubiously factual way during a segment highlighting Ovechkin’s individual brilliance. Capitals fans are never going to take kindly to that.

While Carbery has certainly reinvigorated a Capitals team that seemed destined for a long rebuild just two years ago, Pang’s comments are a stretch, insinuating that he is solely responsible for changing how Ovechkin scores goals.

The timing of the comments didn’t help either. Capitals fans are more on edge than ever regarding national coverage of the team’s games due to Ovechkin inching closer and closer to surpassing Wayne Gretzky for the NHL’s all-time goals record. The league’s national TV partners will air four of the team’s last six games this season, meaning the record-breaking goal may happen without Joe Beninati’s voice behind it.

Beninati, the Capitals’ longtime play-by-play announcer, recently told Elliot Segal of Elliot in the Morning that he would be “crushed” if he can’t call Ovechkin’s milestone 894th and 895th career goals.

You won’t find a Capitals fan that doesn’t feel the same.