Longtime NHL Goaltender and Analyst Explains Controversial Comments on Alex Ovechkin

Well, I give (Capitals coach) Spencer Carbery and his coaching staff an awful lot of credit. 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].

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.