Evgeni Malkin got a job behind Alexander Ovechkin

Another day of the NHL regular season brought the famous Pittsburgh Penguins center Evgeni Malkin, who scored a double in the match with the New York Islanders, to second place in the list of the best Russian NHL snipers, and gave his partner Kris Letang an even more remarkable achievement. Defender Letang had six assists in this match, five of them in one period.

It was, of course, the strangest match of a very busy day of the NHL championship, which resumed after a short Christmas break. Pittsburgh, which is second to last in the Metropolitan Division, met on the road with the second-place team in it, and gave it a beating that anyone who lived through it would hardly want to remember. The visitors endlessly bullied the Islanders’ defense and their two Russian goalies – Ilya Sorokin and his eventual replacement, Semyon Varlamov – and won 7-0.

Among the heroes of this meeting was the famous Russian center forward Evgeni Malkin, whose personal tone this season, despite the fact that the player is already 37, is perhaps better than the team’s. Malkin had been constantly scoring points before (he already had 29 in 33 matches), and scored a double in the clash with the Islanders. It provided him with a rather curious statistical achievement.

It is clear that the best Russian sniper in the NHL is the same hockey player from whom it is expected that, perhaps in a couple of years, having overcome the crisis that overtook him in 2023, he will still turn into simply the best sniper in the league of all time, surpassing Wayne Gretzky. Alexander Ovechkin already has 828 goals in the regular season, and he is beyond the reach of his compatriots.

But the second Russian sniper so far has been another legend – the current CSKA coach Sergei Fedorov. He has 483 goals. But thanks to two goals against the Islanders, Malkin passed him.

However, this breakthrough was slightly lost against the background of another achievement that appeared thanks to the unexpected pliability of the New York club. It is truly quite remarkable.

Kris Letang joked after this match: “It seemed to me that if I gave the puck to someone, a goal would definitely happen.” There was actually a fair amount of truth in the joke. In this game, Letang scored six assists. The figure is, in principle, gorgeous, even outside of any context. Even outstanding scorers rarely achieve this level. Neither Malkin nor his outstanding Canadian partner Sidney Crosby, for example, ever managed to achieve it. But it is important to know that Letang is a defender. But defensemen in the history of the NHL have recorded half a dozen assists in a game only six times before. And the last one was Gary Suter of the Calgary Flames back in 1986.

And that is not all. The trick is that five of Kris Letang’s assists came in a completely terrible second period for the Islanders: in it, the guests tormented him incredibly cruelly, and they hit the target on average once every minute of the game.

And now this is a full-fledged record. Half a dozen assists in a single twenty-minute period is a level that defenders have never achieved before Letang, known, among other things, for continuing to play hockey at the highest level, despite two micro-strokes. Moreover, none of the Pittsburgh forwards conquered her, although the great Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr appeared on the ice in the club’s uniform. In general, Letang’s campaign is comprised of only one player with five assists during the period. In March 1984, they were shot by Winnipeg Jets forward Dale Hawerchuk in a match against the Los Angeles Kings.

It turned out that Kris Letang himself knew nothing about the record. And naturally, I was surprised when coach Michael Sullivan said after the match that the 36-year-old veteran had done something, as the coach put it, “absolutely incredible.”

Alexey Dospehov