Hockey “Spartak” signed a contract with Ilya Kovalchuk

Hockey Spartak, which seems ready to make a serious breakthrough this season, has made one of the most unexpected acquisitions in the history of the KHL. He signed a contract with a graduate of his school, Ilya Kovalchuk, who during his long career managed to win a bunch of prizes in the NHL, the domestic league, and also as a member of the Russian national team. The problem is that the outstanding forward is already 40 years old and has not played hockey for two years.

Hockey “Spartak” announced that he has signed a contract with forward Ilya Kovalchuk. The contract is valid until the end of the season and, according to Sport Express, the hockey player, according to its terms, will earn 15 million rubles at the Moscow club.

This news is the second big surprise related to Spartak in recent months. The first is his actual game.

“Spartak” has always had the status of an ordinary middle peasant in the KHL, never made it to the playoffs beyond the second round, and over the past 12 years they even reached this modest stage only once, and then only thanks to circumstances. Last year, after the start of a special military operation in Ukraine, the Finnish Jokerit left the domestic league. The Spartak team had to play with him in the opening round. As a result, they were allowed into the next one without a fight, in which the Muscovites were defeated by SKA without much difficulty. The capital team failed the previous championship, being left without a play-off.

However, after him, amazing metamorphoses occurred with Spartak. He shows a great game, and after winning the second time in an exciting match with Dynamo – 8:7 in overtime – he climbed to the top line in the Western Conference table.

But the contract with Ilya Kovalchuk is a surprise, in a sense, even louder than today’s Spartak tone. Introducing the newcomer, Spartak recalled that he is a graduate of the club, was in its structure at the age of 11 and managed to play 100 matches for the main team in the Major League, in fact, the second division of domestic hockey. Thanks to them, he earned a reputation as a hockey prodigy and the first number in the 2001 NHL draft, under which no Russians had ever been selected before Kovalchuk.

Ilya Kovalchuk was taken over by the Atlanta Thrashers and became one of the strongest strikers in world hockey. From Atlanta, he made it to the NHL All-Star Games three times, and in 2004 he won the prize for the best sniper of the regular season. In the end, Kovalchuk’s phenomenal performance (he had a total of 443 goals in 926 North American matches) earned him a gigantic contract with another club. This is a 15-year contract signed in 2010 with the New Jersey Devils worth $100 million.

True, Ilya Kovalchuk was not able to play for him at least a more or less significant part of the period stipulated by the agreement. In 2013, he surprised with his decision to return to Russia – to SKA. However, after playing for him for five and a half seasons, Kovalchuk again decided to try himself in the NHL, but did not achieve his previous success with either the Los Angeles Kings, the Montreal Canadiens, or the Washington Capitals, again going to Russia , this time to the Omsk Avangard.

Ilya Kovalchuk’s collection includes many prizes. Moreover, the most valuable of them are not related to the NHL, but to the Russian national team and the KHL. If his teams never won the Stanley Cup, Kovalchuk has three Gagarin Cups on his record – two with SKA, one with Avangard. As for the national team, if a poll was conducted among experts and fans to determine the title of its strongest player in this century, then Ilya Kovalchuk would probably claim victory in the competition along with, say, Alexander Ovechkin. He is something of a symbol, the “face” of the brightest Russian triumphs.

It was Kovalchuk’s goals at the end of regulation time and overtime that brought the Russian national team a legendary victory in the Quebec final of the 2008 World Cup over the Canadians.

And at the 2009 gold championship in Switzerland, he was its undisputed leader. Ilya Kovalchuk has two Olympic medals. In Salt Lake City in 2002, at the age of 18, he took bronze, and in Pyeongchang in 2018, at 34, he took gold. Moreover, his contribution to the Pyeongchang takeoff was enormous: Kovalchuk was recognized as the best player of the tournament.

An important nuance is that Spartak signed not just a veteran, but a veteran who turned 40 years old back in April and who has been since the spring of 2021 – after the final series of the Gagarin Cup (in which Avangard defeated CSKA, and Ilya Kovalchuk in did not score a single point in six meetings) – did not play hockey. Moreover, he has already tried himself as a functionary. At last year’s Olympics in Beijing, he served as general manager of the silver-medal-winning Russian team, working in conjunction with its head coach Alexei Zhamnov, who heads Spartak.

At the same time, there are no obvious reasons hinting that Zhamnov’s club currently needs to strengthen its attack. The basis of Spartak’s achievements in this championship is, first of all, the productivity of the attack. In terms of the number of goals scored, he leads the KHL by a significant margin: Spartak has 145, while its closest pursuers, Metallurg and Severstal, have 124 each. Two of the team’s forwards, Nikolai Goldobin and Pavel Poryadin, are among the top 10 scorers in the championship, two more – Ivan Morozov and Andrey Loktionov – are in the top 20. And the effectiveness of the majority, which has always been Kovalchuk’s strong point, is at a quite decent level for Spartak – 24.1%.

Alexey Dospehov