Empty-net goals, as we all know, are the worst kind of goals. They merely turn a likely win into a certain win, and that is a shameful thing done only by shameless stat-padders who care more about their individual stats than about their teams, for whom they have just guaranteed a win.

One such shameless stat-padder is Alex Ovechkin, who scored two ENGs on Wednesday night to defeat the Philadelphia Flyers. He sure has been scoring a lot of empty-net goals lately. One could say, if one were really reaching for timely cultural resonance, that Ovechkin is in goblin mode: “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.”

Okay, he’s not really any of those things, but please play along with the bit as together we explore Ovi and empty-net goals.

Alex Ovechkin has 51 empty-net goals in his career. He trails only Wayne Gretzky (56) in that statistic. ENGs made up 6.3 percent of Gretzky’s total goal count; they currently make up 6.4 percent of Ovechkin’s total goal count. That feels like a fair proportion, insofar as we can even compare the wildest goal-scoring psychos in NHL history. But Ovechkin’s feasting upon the empty net is kind of a recent evolution.

There have been three seasons in which Ovechkin scored not a single empty-netter — and only one of them was a COVID year. But he’s scored 12 just since the start of last season, already the biggest two-season total of his career — with 54 games left to play.

When thinking about empty-net goals, we have to keep in mind how opportunity gets limited. The opposing team won’t pull their goalie if you’re losing or tied, and they won’t pull him in a blowout either. You get the chance to score an empty-netter if you’re leading a lot, often by vulnerable margins, often late in games. At the very beginning of Ovechkin’s career, conservative hockey orthodoxy discouraged pulling a goalie early. I credit Patrick Roy for breaking that taboo.

So we’ve seen the Capitals wax and wane in the standings, and we’ve seen pulled-goalie situations increase in general. I think there’s an impression that Ovechkin is on the ice whenever there’s an empty net. That’s not accurate at all. Out of 143 forwards who’ve played at least four minutes of five-on-six play this season, Ovechkin ranks 59th in time-on-ice percentage. He’s played 6.1 of 15 minutes, or 41 percent of the time. Here’s a monster table of those forwards, ordered by their share of empty-net ice time.

That’s significantly less than how other teams use their go-to guys. Edmonton has Draisaitl and Connor McDavid out there for 60-70 percent of empty-net situations. By total minutes, Ovechkin has played half as much as Draisaitl. The forward who leads in minutes played against an empty net is Nico Hischier, which is probably a function of how dominant the Devils have been. I hate them.

But regardless of opportunity, Ovechkin is out there scoring goals. And yet, across the last three, plague-ridden seasons, Ovechkin is still not the league leader in empty-net goals. That title belongs to Jake Guentzel, a.k.a. a guy who plays with Sidney Crosby. Ovechkin was in third, tied with Carolina’s Andrei Svechnikov until last night.

Still, twelve goals is a big total, representing 13.5 percent of his total goals in the past three seasons, twice his career rate. Ovechkin is definitely relying more on ENGs than he used to. Just like with his all-situation goals, Ovechkin’s secret is volume. He tries to score 36.5 times per hour — almost double his five-on-five rate.

(Aside: When pulling the numbers for this story, I got stuck. I was convinced my queries were wrong when I pulled goal totals because they were the same as the shot totals. I lost whole minutes of my life before I realized that every shot on goal becomes a goal if the goal has no goalie in it.)

So then there’s the ‘puck hog’ thing. On this week’s Puck Soup podcast, Sean McIndoe and Ryan Lambert mused about the Capitals possibly trading for Brock Boeser (please no). Lambert made up this rule for Boeser: “You are never allowed to shoot on an empty net. You have to pass to Alex Ovechkin.”

Shots fired, but I can’t find the fault in it. Ovechkin has taken 70 percent of Washington’s shot attempts when on the ice against an empty net. Among 246 forwards who’ve played at least fifteen empty-net minutes over the past three seasons, Ovechkin’s share is the bigger than 245 of them, which is to say everyone. Only two goals have been scored by non-Ovechkin players while he’s on the ice, and that’s fewer than all but ten players in the same cohort.

So Ovechkin doesn’t necessarily get on the ice that much against an empty-net, but when he does — hell yes, they get him the puck. Honestly, that’s fine by me. Empty-net goals secure victories, and Alex Ovechkin rocks at doing them.