GIF by welshhockeyfan.tumblr.com
While the glove kiss remains Alex Ovechkin’s first reaction to scoring, we’ve seen him add new flourishes over the years. There’s jumping into the glass and the hot stick fiasco, and now it’s time to add a new item to the list: the belly pat.
We like to think of it as the gestural companion to “attaboy”, something that a four year-old boy who just learned how to eat with a fork might do when he’s pleased with himself. It’s a thing of joy, of bravado, of that precise brand of smugness that makes Ovi so lovable to his fans and so infuriating to everyone else.
Ovechkin is hot and he knows it. With 9 goals in 9 games since the Washington Post’s “What’s Wrong With Ovi” story, he has climbed from obscurity to fourth in the league’s goal-scoring race. Read into the belly pat however you want. We think it means something like this:
That was nice, but I’m hungry for MOAR.
For his part, Ovechkin is being coy about the new move. Talking to Tarik El-Bashir of the Washington Post, Ovechkin laughed it off: “I do it before, I think.”
So far, from our count, Ovechkin has done the belly pat after his last five goals.
March 19, 2012, Against the Red Wings
March 22, 2012, Against the Flyers
March 23, 2012, Against the Jets
March 25, 2012, Against the Wild
RMNB is not associated with the Washington Capitals; Monumental Sports, the NHL, or its properties. Not even a little bit.
All original content on russianmachineneverbreaks.com is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)– unless otherwise stated or superseded by another license. You are free to share, copy, and remix this content so long as it is attributed, done for noncommercial purposes, and done so under a license similar to this one.
Share On