KHL events of the week: debut against father’s club, goalkeeper goal

Dynamo goalkeeper Ilya Konovalov scored the first goalkeeper’s goal in 15 years

A lot of interesting things happened in the regular season of the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) last week, take at least the battle between the two main monsters of recent seasons, CSKA and SKA (the Muscovites managed to slow down the obvious leaders from St. Petersburg a little – 4:2!), but the main let’s focus on the debut of Dmitry Kokorev and Matvey Michkov in HC Sochi, as well as on the puck abandoned by Dynamo goalkeeper Ilya Konovalov. About this and much more – in the traditional review of “MK”.

… Life, as you know, is the best playwright: by the way, the great commentator Roman Skvortsov said this phrase during a hockey broadcast. More precisely, at the moment when the Russian team won the World Championship for the first time in 15 years – in 2008, in Canada.

Why did I remember this? Yes, just look at which opponent Dmitry Kokorev made his debut as the head coach of HC Sochi: Moscow Spartak! The fact is that although Dmitry himself did not play so much for the red-and-whites (and he became the champion of Russia in 2000 with Dynamo in general), and he changed a dozen clubs during his career, but his father Alexander Kokorev played for many years it is for the Spartacists and is quite associated with them.

That’s just talking about … football “Spartak”. And the father of the current hockey coach won the gold medals of the USSR championship with him in 1979 – the very year when Dmitry was born. Amazing intersections, right?

And Kokorev was replaced at the head of the Sochi hockey club by Dynamo’s flesh and blood – Sergei Svetlov. Admittedly, he didn’t go at all: 24 defeats in 25 matches! However, who is in Sochi this season? Maybe at least a new coach, together with the main, probably the prodigy of our hockey, Matvey Michkov, who moved to the Black Sea on a loan basis (and Kokorev has experience working with such talents as Vyacheslav Svechnikov and Mikhail Sergachev, now shining in the NHL), a little – it will cheer you up a little in the Olympic capital-2014 at the finish of the regular season – about the playoffs, of course, there is no question …

But if there we can reason only hypothetically-theoretically, then the first goal in 14 years by a direct throw of the goalkeeper is already the most real one. Ilya Konovalov from Dynamo scored at the end of the match against Nizhny Novgorod Torpedo! Beautifully on horseback he sent the puck out of the zone, when the opponent removed his colleague in the “frame” from the “frame”, trying to recoup. The last to do this was Ilya Proskuryakov, who spoke at that time in Magnitogorsk – and also in January, but in 2009. In the game with Ak Bars.

Like Proskuryakov then, by the way, Konovalov honestly admitted that he didn’t aim at the goal, he wanted to throw the puck away: “And since the torpedoes blocked the sides, I threw it in the center!”

In general, in fairness, in the annals of the KHL, three more goalkeeper-scorers were recorded (Edgars Masalskis, Vitaly Eremeev and Yoni Ortio), but they all scored not with a direct throw, but became goalscorers by chance: they were simply the last to touch the puck in their team – own goals after all, hockey is not fixed …