Artemiy Panarin remains one of the hottest hockey players

Russian New York Rangers forward Artemy Panarin remains one of the hottest hockey players of the NHL regular season. In the match against the Detroit Red Wings, Panarin extended his streak of games in which he scored at least a point, which began at the start of the season, to 12.

As part of another and very eventful day of the NHL regular season, the New York Rangers and Detroit played a spectacular match. The New Yorkers, the owners of the site, defeated their opponents with a score of 5:3, despite quite serious losses. The Rangers were missing several key players due to injuries, including Russian goaltender Igor Shesterkin, who was replaced by veteran Jonathan Quick. However, the vigor of the attack compensated for these losses.

And the undisputed leader of the New York attack is Artemiy Panarin. Actually, there is nothing surprising in the fact that he has this status. Artemi Panarin moved to the Rangers from the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2019, and since then the club’s dependence on his tone has been colossal. Panarin actually performs a colossal number of functions on the ice: he accelerates attacks, sometimes from his own zone, he conducts them in the other third, he finishes them.

But this season, Artemiy Panarin seems to be as “hot” as he’s ever been. In the meeting with Detroit he had a goal and an assist. But this is not the main thing.

The main thing is that the match with Detroit continued the series of those in which the Russian scored points. It opened at the start of the season and has already spanned a dozen games.

To understand how serious this figure is, you need to know that Panarin found himself close to the club record. It has been owned for half a century and has been owned by Rod Gilbert for one year. In 1972, he accelerated in the regular championship with 14 scoring matches in a row.

Artemy Panarin can already be safely included among the candidates for the league’s top scorer prize at the end of the season. In the list of top scorers, after the meeting with Detroit, he climbed to third position with 20 points (seven goals and thirteen assists). Ahead, but not far away, are Panarin’s compatriots Nikita Kucherov from the Tampa Bay Lightning and Elias Pettersson from the Vancouver Canucks. Kucherov has 22 points (and with an extra match), Pettersson has 21.

And, of course, after such a start to the season, it is not difficult to assume that Artemy Panarin will finally be able to “break through” the classic mark for elite forwards of one hundred points scored in the regular season. The fact that she still hasn’t submitted to him looks like some kind of ridiculous accident. Panarin repeatedly, including last season, was close to this milestone, scoring more than 90 points three times, but each time something prevented him from going a little further.

Although, presumably, Rangers fans are more concerned about team successes than Artemi Panarin’s personal successes.

New Yorkers have had such a talent pool for quite some time now that their rise seems almost inevitable. In terms of brightness of names, they have few equals.

However, they always stumble when preparing to make such a takeoff.

The previous season was a typical case. The Rangers had a good regular season, and before the playoffs they strengthened their already powerful roster with stars such as Vladimir Tarasenko and Patrick Kane. Nevertheless, already in the first round the giant was knocked out by the stubborn New Jersey Devils, who did not pay attention to two defeats with a score of 5:1, after which they lost 0:2. Rangers again, out of habit, collapsed at the most inopportune moment.

So far in the championship, everything is going well for the New Yorkers. Their Metropolitan division is quite strong in terms of selecting competitors, but with only three misfires, the Rangers are on the top line in its table, ahead of the Carolina Hurricanes, despite the fact that all experts saw this club as one of the undisputed favorites of the season. And Panarin, the main New York hero, after the victory over Detroit, assured the fans that together with his partners he “feels like a team.” This feeling has actually been lacking in the club a lot lately.

Alexey Dospehov