No power play in modern hockey has been studied, scouted, and prepared for as thoroughly as Alex Ovechkin's, and it barely matters. For well over a decade, opposing penalty kills have known almost exactly what Washington was going to try, and they still couldn't consistently stop it. That gap between knowing a play is coming and actually stopping it is the whole story of power play strategy.
The formation behind it is called the 1-3-1: one player up high near the blue line, three spread across the middle of the ice, and one down low near the net. Capitals coach Adam Oates installed it for the 2012-13 season and put Ovechkin specifically in the left faceoff circle — a spot that's been nicknamed "Ovi's Office" ever since. The results were immediate and dramatic: Washington's power play jumped from 16.7 percent (18th in the NHL) the year before to 26.8 percent (first in the league) that very season. Oates was fired the following year, but the Capitals kept the 1-3-1 anyway, because there was no reasonable argument for changing it.
The spot itself has a genuinely accidental origin. According to a teammate's account from Ovechkin's rookie season in 2005, a different Capitals player scored three straight power-play goals from a one-timer in the left circle over the Christmas holidays. Watching that, coach Glen Hanlon simply decided to try the rookie Ovechkin there instead to see what would happen. It worked immediately, and nobody ever moved him again.
The mechanics of why it's so hard to defend come down to Ovechkin's shot itself — a right-handed one-timer released off his off-wing, arriving fast enough that goaltenders have almost no margin for a late reaction even when they've seen the pass coming the entire time. Dave Andreychuk, the man Ovechkin passed for the NHL's all-time power-play goals record, put it plainly: a penalty kill's whole plan is to get a stick in the shooting lane, and Ovechkin's release disrupts that plan more than almost anyone else's ever has.
None of this means penalty killing is hopeless against a play like it — it means the counter has to happen earlier than the shot itself. Modern penalty kill units are built around two core formations: the box, which packs four skaters into a tight square shielding the middle of the ice, and the diamond, which stretches one defender higher specifically to pressure a shooter exactly like Ovechkin before a one-timer can even be loaded up. Increasingly, penalty kills lean toward active, aggressive stick positioning rather than passive shot-blocking — constantly working the stick into likely passing lanes rather than just standing in a lane and hoping a shot finds a body.
The real point of defense against a play this well-known isn't to guess the shot and hope to block it — it's to deny the pass that sets it up in the first place. Taking away the clean cross-ice or seam feed to the one-timer spot forces the power play into a second or third option, and second options are, by definition, less practiced and less dangerous than the first. A great power play like Washington's isn't unstoppable because the defense doesn't know what's coming. It's dangerous because executing a well-drilled play under pressure is simply harder than defending against one — and after more than a decade, that gap still hasn't fully closed.