Nikita Kucherov continues to lead the NHL championship scoring race

Another magnificent match – against the New Jersey Devils, in which he scored a goal and made three assists – allowed Tampa Bay Lightning forward Nikita Kucherov to overcome the mark of one hundred points scored in the NHL regular season for the fourth time in his career. Kucherov is confidently leading in the season’s scoring race, and his form suggests that at the finish of the championship he is capable of setting his sights not only on his personal record in points from five years ago, but also on the record of this century, set last year by Connor McDavid.

In fact, for the Tampa players and their coach John Cooper, it seems that this has already turned into something like a sacred duty – to say something bright about Nikita Kucherov after the next match. And you can’t evade it anywhere – they won’t understand, considering how much he does for the club, how much the Russian forward means to it. So we have to invent epithets and definitions, although the set of those that come to mind on the spot is almost exhausted. So after the away meeting with New Jersey, in which Tampa beat her opponent – 4:1, Cooper, for probably the thousandth time, called Kucherov a “special” hockey player, and the team’s best defenseman, Victor Hedman, said that when you are on the ice with him, you just need to try to open up: “Kuch will definitely find you.”

The match with New Jersey – in general, by the way, was not as easy for the guests as the score might seem – was, it must be said, an excellent illustration of how all these platitudes correspond to reality. Well, yes, even in the NHL, only a few have the ability to turn a seemingly ordinary episode into a scoring episode – with one movement, one jerk, an unexpected pass. And at a level like today’s Kucherov, who manages to handle even inconvenient pucks that seem destined to go to his opponent in such a way that he arranges a one-on-one for his partner, perhaps no one.

Nikita Kucherov was involved in absolutely all of Tampa’s goals.

To three – Victor Hedman, Brayden Point and Brandon Heigl – as an assistant, and in the end, when New Jersey replaced goalkeeper Akira Schmid with a sixth field player, he also scored into an empty net. And he received congratulations on an important statistical achievement.

In the NHL, as you know, a mark of one hundred points scored in the regular season is considered evidence of exceptional scoring talent. Nikita Kucherov conquered her for the fourth time in his career during the match with New Jersey (he had 98 points before). This is already a remarkable fact, because none of the Russians had four seasons with a hundred, except him and the great Alexander Ovechkin. It’s doubly remarkable because Kucherov overcame the milestone very early: it’s winter, and Tampa still has 22 matches on the calendar for the current championship. In them, she will fight for a ticket to the playoffs, which is far from guaranteed for the club, despite the exploits of the leader and good results recently (in its Atlantic division, for example, it is only fifth), and Kucherov – for notable personal achievements .

Thanks to the explosion in the meeting with New Jersey, he established himself at the top of the classification of the best scorers of the championship.

He has firmly established himself: his 102 points are six more than his closest pursuer and, apparently, his only competitor, because the others are much further away, Nathan MacKinnon from the Colorado Avalanche.

Moreover, Nikita Kucherov clearly needs to exceed his previous peak. In 2019, he finished the regular season with 128 points. Kucherov’s current numbers in the “projection” for the entire regular season distance give as much as 139 points.

But this, it seems, is not the limit. The scoring record for this century was set last year by Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers. McDavid, who is now well behind Kucherov and MacKinnon, then scored 153 points. This is, of course, the highest bar, but dynamics are important. At the end of the winter, Kucherov was incredibly productive, and the day before the match against New Jersey, he had three points in a meeting with the New York Islanders. So McDavid’s record is not completely safe.

Alexey Dospehov