Alex Ovechkin is known to troll former teammates and give certain looks to former coaches.
This fun behavior continued on Tuesday night after Ovechkin scored the 889th goal of his career in the Capitals’ 3-2 overtime loss to the Winnipeg Jets. The tally, which brought Ovechkin to within 6 of breaking the NHL’s all-time goals record, tied the game between the two best teams in the league with four minutes remaining in the third period.
Ovechkin was overjoyed after lighting the lamp, going down to one knee and pumping his fist. He appeared to scream “LET’S GO” to his teammates in the goal hug before skating down to the Capitals’ fist-bump line. Jets head coach Scott Arniel revealed postgame an additional memorable wrinkle of Ovi’s celebration that happened as he neared the benches.
“He came by the bench and gave me the biggest smirk,” Arniel said laughing.
Arniel spent four seasons as an assistant coach with the Capitals from 2018-19 through 2021-22, leading the team’s penalty kill and working with Caps’ forwards.
“I’m glad he got the goal, in the sense, or getting closer to his goal. Excuse me, I’m not glad he got the goal. I’m glad he’s getting close to whatever that (record-breaking) number is,” Arniel explained. “End of the day, that’s him. It doesn’t take much. The puck is on his stick, off his stick… He doesn’t need much time or space.”
When a reporter asked if Arniel returned the smirk after the Jets’ overtime win, he responded with amusement, “I didn’t get to see him. He was further down the bench. I might see him later.”
This isn’t the first time Ovechkin has played mind games with a former coach just by making eye contact. In January 2022, Ovechkin smiled and patted his belly at Bruce Boudreau, the then-head coach of the Vancouver Canucks. Boudreau was previously Ovechkin’s head coach of the Capitals from 2007 through 2011.
“I wouldn’t look at him, and he was looking right at me, and I said, ‘No more!’ because he has a tendency, if he played against me every day, he’d probably have 110 goals a year,” Boudreau said then. “He gets up for it.”
Ovechkin also has no mercy for goaltenders, especially if they are Russian or are a former Capitals teammate.
“Sanya (Ovechkin), by the way, usually also shouts to all our goalkeepers: ‘Now I’ll f— you.’ And everything else like that,” Ilya Samsonov said in a Russian language interview earlier in the season. “But it doesn’t bother me.”
The former Toronto Maple Leafs netminder joked that his old teammates said “lots of bad words” to him in his first homecoming game against the Capitals during the 2022-23 campaign.
“Every time he tell me lots of bad words,” Carolina Hurricanes’ goaltender Pyotr Kochetkov, a fellow countryman, said in November. “He scored me, ‘I score you! I score you!’ All Russians do this. It’s no problem for me.”
Famously, during warmups of Game 5 of the 2018 Stanley Cup Final, Ovechkin got under Marc-Andre Fleury’s skin by tapping his pads with his stick, irritating the future Hall of Famer goaltender to the point where he chased after him on the ice.
Ovechkin’s gamesmanship is just another layer of what makes him such a historic figure on the ice. There’s no one who wants to win more, and he’s not above doing something silly to try and gain an advantage.
