Alexander Ovechkin joined the race – Newspaper Kommersant No. 194 (7395) dated 10/19/2022

Another day in the regular season of the NHL became the “day of Russia”. In the matches that fell on him, several domestic hockey players distinguished themselves at once, and the brightest of all was Alexander Ovechkin from the Washington Capitals, who scored two goals at once after three consecutive meetings without goals at all, and also scored four points and soared to the top line of the league’s scorer rating Artemi Panarin of the New York Rangers.

The second full week of the NHL regular season opened with a very busy afternoon. There were a total of nine of them, and many were unconditional heroes. But to choose among them the main hero, the first star, the league, of course, was not difficult. The context helped.

It was simply impossible to pass by the Washington home game with the Vancouver Canucks. It’s not even about his curious plot: before the final period, the Washingtonians were losing 2:4, but managed to achieve a turning point, winning with a score of 6:4. The main reason to highlight this meeting was the performance of the leader of the hosts Alexander Ovechkin.

Before the collision with Vancouver, Washington played three games in the regular season – lost to the Boston Bruins and Toronto Maple Leafs and barely coped with the Montreal Canadiens. So-so start for a team that, given the quality of its bid, experience, is still included in at least the expanded roster of Stanley Cup hunters. But Ovechkin’s personal start was even worse than the collective one.

In these three matches, the best sniper of our time got only one point for performance, and most importantly, did not score a single goal. Such a series at the start of the NHL season in Ovechkin happened only once in his life – ten years ago. In general, everyone who is already accustomed to closely watching how the Russian striker storms the top of the league’s sniper hierarchy of all time was a little confused: what if, at 37, he is still not the same?

But now you can calm down.

In the match with Vancouver, Alexander Ovechkin broke through. He scored twice – the first and sixth goals of his team – and added as many assists to the pucks.

And the study of the position in the sniper hierarchy has again become relevant. Ovechkin has 782 goals in the regular season after this game. And Gordie Howe, who ranks second behind Wayne Gretzky, is only 19 goals away.

Artemy Panarin also received a colossal portion of attention that day. His New York Rangers beat Anaheim with the same score 6:4, and Panarin appeared in this meeting as a man-orchestra, who knows how to do everything: disperse attacks, conduct them in a foreign zone, complete them. As a result, he had four points – a goal and three assists.

In fact, the NHL has long been accustomed to the breadth of Panarin’s functionality, as well as to his high performance. In the previous championship, for example, he lacked only four points to finally conquer the grandmaster mark of 100 points for the regular season. And the blame for the fact that she did not submit, only missed matches – there were seven of them.

Judging by the acceleration in the current season, Artemy Panarin is ready not only to take the 100-point bar, but to overshoot it with a huge margin.

After all, the match with Anaheim was already the second for him after the game with the Minnesota Wild, in which he collected four points. And in total, Panarin already has ten of them in four matches, and this, of course, is a chic statistic.

Artemy Panarin is now leading the NHL scorer race, and looking at it should warm the soul of any fan of Russian hockey. There are a lot of domestic forwards in its upper part, who successfully entered the season, taking a good pace right off the bat. For example, Valery Nichushkin, who suddenly turned into the most dangerous player of the current Stanley Cup holder Colorado Avalanche in October, occupies the top five and has already hit the opponents’ gates four times. Not far from him, who, like Ovechkin, have five points each, Andrei Svechnikov from the Carolina Hurricanes and Kirill Kaprizov from Minnesota. Slightly lower with 4 points is veteran Evgeni Malkin from the Pittsburgh Penguins and Alexander Ovechkin’s teammate Evgeny Kuznetsov.

Alexey Dospekhov