All these years later, even though you know what’s coming, it’s still stunning, still a miraculous and magnificent moment in hockey history: a 20-year-old rookie by the name of Alexander Ovechkin, sliding on his back, facing away from the goal, reaching overhead with his stick, hooking the puck, flicking a backhand goal into the net against the Phoenix Coyotes … right there in front of none other than Wayne Gretzky. It wasn’t the most crucial goal ever scored, given that it happened on a Monday afternoon in a January 2006 match between two mediocre teams, but it might just be the most cinematic … and for what it heralded, maybe the most significant, too.
As Ovechkin nears Gretzky’s all-time goal scoring record — he’s seven away from breaking the record The Great One’s held since 1994 — it’s worth looking back at one of the earliest times the two crossed paths, a moment that defined Ovechkin as a player for the ages, even as a rookie.
“God, it was one of the most amazing goals I’ve ever seen. Amazing,” Darren Pang, then a color commentator for the Coyotes, recalled to Yahoo Sports. “Three guys probably thought the play was dead, and one guy didn’t, and he ends up scoring one of the greatest-looking goals in history.”
The Great Eight’s arrival
A tall, muscled Russian with a vicious shot and a taste for collision, Ovechkin arrived in the NHL at a precipitous time for the entire sport. The league was coming off the 2004-05 lockout, the first time a major American sport had canceled an entire season. Years of grinding, defense-first hockey had driven down both scoring and fan interest.
But Ovechkin and fellow incoming rookie Sidney Crosby of Pittsburgh rode a new wave of interest and hope into the season. Selected first overall by the Caps in the 2004 draft, Ovechkin opted to keep playing pro hockey in Russia during the lockout. That only bolstered the secondhand hype for Ovechkin, since few Americans had actually laid eyes on him. What they knew was that he was something talented, something new, and for the first post-lockout season, that was enough.
“I don’t think people really knew who he was, whereas Crosby, you knew who he was from the time he was 13,” recalls Jeff Halpern, then the Washington Capitals’ captain. “There was a huge buzz of Crosby coming in, and Ovi was this really good player from Russia, and that was about it.”
“I remember seeing both at the World Junior Championships in North Dakota,” recalls Pang. “That was the lockout year, and Canada had a really dominant team because a lot of their players that had played in the NHL were able to go back and play in the World Juniors, like Patrice Bergeron, and I know Sidney played in that.”
Pang arrived in North Dakota intending to focus primarily on Canadian players, but the Russian kid made a hell of an impression … in more ways than one.
“I just couldn’t believe that a player, a forward, hit as hard as he did. Honestly, I’m not sure if I remember anything other than that,” Pang recalls. “I don’t really recall a one-timer or him stickhandling through the neutral zone. I remember him skating around and eliminating a lot of American players in the semifinal. He was a one-man wrecking crew, and I’m like, What is this? It’s like a robot on ice.”
Not everyone was quite so impressed with the pre-NHL Ovechkin. “I went to the world championships that year in the Czech Republic, and he was … fine, you know?” Halpern recalls. “Nothing stood out to me.”
And then Ovechkin donned a Capitals sweater, and everything changed.
You could see right from the first drop of the puck that this guy was a real talented player, and that as a goalie you’re going to have to be ready for him. — Brian Boucher
Washington had been a reliable if underachieving playoff team prior to the lockout, even reaching the Stanley Cup Finals in 1997-98. But by 2005, the team had begun a selloff of its high-priced veteran talent, and the effects echoed in the empty stands.
“Coming out of the lockout, I would say the fan base was not really high,” Halpern says. “Washington is a fairly transient sports town. Football was always big, but hockey catered to the hockey community and that was it, really. So when Ovi came, there was buzz, but not in the way if he was going to Toronto or Montreal.”
Ovechkin debuted in the NHL at the exact moment the league was implementing some significant rule modifications — increasing the size of the neutral zone, for instance, and removing the center red line to permit longer passes — designed to step up offense. He couldn’t have skated into a more perfect situation for his skills.
“When he came into the league, there were some rule changes, and there was a lot of focus on offense,” recalls former Coyotes goalie Brian Boucher. “The era that I played in before him was big, physical, not-much-room type of hockey, and now you get this freewheeling game.”
The new NHL rewarded players who combined both speed and strength … almost as if it was made for someone like Ovechkin, who came into the league at 6-foot-2 and 212 pounds. (He’s now listed at 6-3, 238.) “He could skate and shoot, he could get inside, but he also had the ability to score from outside with a shot, and shoot right through defenders,” Boucher recalls. “You could see right from the first drop of the puck that this guy was a real talented player, and that as a goalie you’re going to have to be ready for him.”
Ovechkin hit the NHL with literally a thundering, glass-breaking crash — the hit that he delivered on Columbus defenseman Radoslav Suchy that cracked the plexiglass on his very first NHL shift. He scored twice in that game, too, but afterward, all anyone could recall was that monstrous hit.
“It’s like when people talk about a certain baseball player, the way they hit the ball it’s just a different sound, or a pitcher that throws really hard, it hits the glove with a different sound,” Halpern recalls. “And the way Ovi hit that kid, it was just a different sound. And it caught you off guard.”
During the 2005-06 season, Ovechkin’s ferocious hits, lightning-quick one-timers and frenetic all-gas-no-brakes style of play all combined to spark intrigue, then interest, then euphoria in the Washington stands.
“He would touch the puck in the defensive zone, and you could hear a buzz in the stadium,” Halpern recalls. “People forget that Ovi was an end-to-end rush player. He would either go through you or shoot through you. And if you tried to step up on him, he would run you over.”
But “buzz” doesn’t translate to wins. On the ice and in the standings, the 2005-06 Capitals weren’t doing much winning. The team joked that they were eliminated from the playoffs in October, or that they should hang black curtains over the unused upper deck of what was then called the MCI Center.
By mid-January, the Capitals were 13-24-5, stumbling through a six-game losing streak. But the Caps got a rare win over Anaheim on Jan. 14, a Friday night, thanks to an Ovechkin hat trick — his 28th, 29th and 30th goals, for the record. With a free weekend, the veterans decided to hold the team’s Rookie Dinner. At that dinner, Halpern recalls players hollering “One more year!” at former captain Brendan Witt, who was on a one-year deal. (He would be traded to Nashville two months later.) It was a rare moment of joy in a slog of a season. Next up: Phoenix.
‘The Goal’
The Coyotes were the very definition of middling — 22-21-2 coming into the game. “Truthfully we weren’t the greatest team in the world,” Boucher recalls. “So when you play an opponent like that, you’re thinking this is an opportunity for us to get two points. I mean, we’re not playing the Detroit Red Wings tonight, so this is a chance for us to win, you know.”
Mediocre as they were, those 2005-06 Coyotes were coached by none other than Wayne Gretzky. “You had a coaching staff of Gretzky, Ulf Samuelsson, Rick Tocchet,” Pang recalls. “I’m thinking, this is unbelievable, because we’ve got the greatest player that’s ever played.”
But Gretzky’s greatness didn’t extend to his team, especially not on this particular afternoon. The Capitals peppered Boucher, pouring in five goals over the first two periods. The afternoon was a forgettable wash … that was about to ascend to hockey immortality.
Around 12 minutes into the third, Ovechkin — who already had one goal on the afternoon — took control of the puck on his right side of the rink in front of his own bench and began streaking, one-on-one, toward Boucher.
“I’m thinking, this guy, he’s got a great shot, right, and you’ve got to respect it,” Boucher recalls. “So I get out and I’m super aggressive, thinking that if he shoots it through my defenseman, I just want to block this puck. I don’t want to give him any net that it could find a hole.”
Boucher pushed forward, looking to close off Ovechkin’s angle. But as he did, Ovechkin darted laterally across the rink, all the way over to the opposite circle. Coyotes defenseman Paul Mara engaged him the whole way, but it was like trying to slow down a locomotive with bare hands.
The move took Boucher by surprise. “I was so badly out of position, yes, but there’s no way as the play is coming over the blue line that I’m anticipating he’s going to end up all the way on the other side to my right when it’s one-on-one,” he recalls. “I’m thinking he’s gonna rip this puck through the defenseman, and that’s why I was so aggressive when it starts.”
Pang, himself a former goalie, understands what Boucher — suddenly out of position, seeing the play wrapping around behind him — was facing in that moment. “You’re trying to do the best you can to take all technique out and throw it out the window,” he says. “You’re really just battling like crazy at that point. You’re basically swimming, you’re doing whatever it takes to try to get back to that post, try to dive, try to get your stick there.”
Ovechkin and Mara got tangled, and like a redwood, Ovechkin crashed to the ice. But the puck was still in front of him, still moving at full speed.
“He falls, I’m trying to push, push, push, push, and I think he’s run out of room,” Boucher recalls. “And somehow on his back he’s able to whack the puck … ”
Still sliding, Ovechkin reached overhead and, with a flick of his wrist, popped the puck into a keyhole of space. “Probably had six inches to put it between the angle of my stick and the inside of the post,” Boucher says.
“The one thing that people don’t realize with goaltending is that (goalies) always think they can stop it,” Pang says. “We think that we can get our stick up and knock it out of mid-air. We think that we can get a glove up as we’re rolling over and stop it. So that’s what made that one most amazing, because I don’t think anybody thought that there was a play to stop.”
For just a moment, no one in the arena — Capitals, Coyotes, coaches, fans, broadcasters — understood or believed quite what had happened.
“I’ve got to check the replay,” Pang recalls thinking, “because I’m not sure if I just saw what I just saw.”
Halpern, out of the game with an injury, was seated near Pang’s broadcast spot. “I remember locking eyes with him, like, ‘Did we just see that happen?’”
Pang remembers the entire arena gasping in disbelief, particularly after the replay was shown. “It was a literal, there’s no way that just happened,” he remembers. “And then it was complete applause, like complete appreciation for it.”
Out on the ice, the Caps exploded in exuberance. After any goal — his own or his teammates’ — Ovi would revel in joy, flying into the glass or jumping up and down. “The guys on the ice were as amazed as the rest of the hockey world,” Halpern recalls. “Ovi came into the pile, and right away he saw Witter and was like, ‘One more year! One more year!’” That made an impression on the veterans — a superstar rookie whose focus was the team, not himself.
Nearby, in one of those perfect moments of sports synchronicity, stood Gretzky himself. Boucher admits he wasn’t looking over at Gretzky in that moment — “I was licking my wounds in the crease” — but notes that in the video, you can see Gretzky “looking bewildered and amazed. I guess it takes a lot to impress the Great One.”
About that time, Ovechkin skated by, and Pang saw Gretzky, arms folded, look at Ovechkin and nod. “It was kind of one of those nods of, ‘That was darn good,’” Pang recalls, “like, ‘That was something else.’”
“I had two thoughts,” Gretzky would later say. “‘How can five guys on the ice not stop a guy on his knees with a rolling puck?’ And then, ‘S***, my record could be in trouble.’”
Pang interviewed Ovechkin on the bench afterward, and remembers the young Russian superstar-to-be couldn’t quite believe what he’d just done either. “I remember saying Wayne Gretzky watched you, and I think he said, ‘That’s really exciting, Wayne Gretzky, great player,’ but that was really about it,” Pang recalls. “It was hard to understand it, but the enthusiasm was genuine and it was a great moment for hockey for sure.”
“Obviously lucky, but I’ll take it,” Ovechkin said at the time. “For that moment, it was unbelievable time. My dream was come true: I play in the NHL, I did that kind of special goal and Gretzky was there, as well.”
The chase of Gretzky is on
Once the reality of the goal set in and the replay rocketed its way around the pre-social media sports universe, the players involved began to reckon with the enormity of the moment. “I was never embarrassed by giving up that goal,” Boucher says. “I mean, if I gave up that goal to a guy who scored seven career goals I might be embarrassed there. But he’s going to go down as the greatest goal scorer in the history of hockey, and if you’re going to score that many goals, there are going to be some that look like that.”
Boucher — who ironically enough still owns the NHL’s longest shutout streak, at 332:01 — would later play for Philadelphia and face Ovechkin several more times, with much more success than that afternoon in Phoenix.
“I think I did pretty well against him after the fact,” he says. “When you play against him your awareness goes up big time. And you want to make sure you don’t get embarrassed.”
Boucher later joined Pang behind the mic, and both now broadcast for TNT, among other outlets. Along with the rest of the hockey world, they’ve watched Ovechkin’s career continue to rise to unthinkable heights.
“I gotta be honest with you. I’ve been doing national TV for 35 years. I never thought someone was going to touch [Gretzky’s] goal scoring mark ever,” Pang says. “I just can’t believe he’s this close.”
Count Halpern, who’s now a coach with the Tampa Bay Lightning, as one of those who didn’t believe Ovechkin could break the mark simply because they didn’t think he’d be playing that long.
“It was like, ‘He won’t be able to walk by the time he’s 30,’” Halpern jokes. “Every game was like, car crash, car crash, car crash.”
Ovechkin, of course, continues to walk, and to skate, and to score, over and over again, for two decades and counting.
“He loves scoring goals so much,” Halpern says. “It’s almost like a drug addict, like he needs to score a goal. He needs the excitement of it. Everybody wants to score a goal. I really feel like Ovi needs to score a goal. He chases that every game. That’s his ultimate high.”
With Ovechkin in the lineup, the Capitals have flourished. Starting with the 2007-08 season, Washington has reached the playoffs 15 of 17 years, culminating with a Stanley Cup in 2018. The Caps have exited the playoffs in the first round of their five playoff appearances since then, but currently sit atop the Metropolitan division.
And Ovechkin? He just keeps on pouring in points, game after game. Rarely does more than a game pass without Ovechkin tallying either a goal or an assist. But as the numbers pile up, and the distance between himself and Gretzky narrows, there still remains that one iconic goal on one remarkable January afternoon in Arizona, the gold standard of his career and the harbinger for everything that was to come. And even those he beat have to tip their masks to him.
“I actually look at it as a badge of honor,” Boucher says. “This guy is the greatest goal scorer in the history of hockey — or will be — and I just happened to be a victim on that particular afternoon.”
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