Evgeni Malkin scattered in December – Newspaper Kommersant No. 238 (7439) of 12/22/2022

Among the heroes of the next day of the NHL regular season was the outstanding Pittsburgh Penguins center Evgeni Malkin, who, thanks to a goal against the New York Rangers, equaled in points scored with Sergei Fedorov, who was second in the list of the best Russian scorers in the league, and confirmed his status as one of the “hottest” hockey players of the championship in December.

After the match, in which Pittsburgh beat the Rangers 3-2 at home, Evgeni Malkin found himself in the spotlight. The reason was quite understandable. The NHL loves statistics, and Malkin’s goal in the second period in the majority, breaking through compatriot Igor Shesterkin, equalized the score, turned out to be quite noticeable from this point of view. The Russian striker scored 1179th point in the NHL regular season with them. The same number is on account of another outstanding center forward, Sergei Fedorov, who completed his North American career in the decade before last. And of the Russians, only Alexander Ovechkin is ahead of them: he has 1446 points.

But it was worth noting this performance by Evgeni Malkin for a more relevant reason. At the end of this year recently completed the success of Alexander Ovechkin’s pursuit of the 800th goal in the regular season, in fact, overshadowed all other events related to domestic hockey players in the NHL. In the meantime, there are quite a few interesting ones among them. The play of the 36-year-old Malkin, who is only a few months younger than the leader of Washington, also belongs to the curious.

The fact is that at the beginning of winter, few celebrities are in the same shape as Evgeni Malkin.

Pittsburgh has played nine games in December so far. And in each of them, Malkin scored at least a point, in some it was about the most important passes or goals.

And in total in these nine matches he has 13 points (three goals with a dozen successful passes). For comparison: Ovechkin has the same amount in this segment, but in ten games, and despite the fact that he scored several goals into an empty net after replacing the opponents’ goalkeeper with a sixth field player.

At the same time, Pittsburgh itself is amazingly “hot”, about the potential of which, including because of the abundance of veterans, there were doubts before the season. Of the nine December matches, he lost only one – the Carolina Hurricanes, and that one was in a fight, on a thin one. And if Pittsburgh, thanks to its breakthrough, entrenched itself in the “play-off zone”, then its neighbor in the Metropolitan division, “Washington”, still cannot penetrate it.

Alexey Dospekhov