Pre-season aggravation - Newspaper Kommersant No. 186 (7387) of 07.10.2022

Pre-season aggravation - Newspaper Kommersant No. 186 (7387) of 07.10.2022



The next season of the National Hockey League (NHL), which opens today, is intriguing, first of all, with the scale of personnel changes. They happened in many of its clubs, including those that were at the top of the hierarchy in the last championship, and did not bypass, for example, two Stanley Cup finalists - the Colorado Avalanche and the Tampa Bay Lightning. However, the brightest representatives of domestic hockey, playing in the NHL, did not go anywhere, and many intriguing moments are also associated with them.

Before this season, which begins today with a match in Prague between the San Jose Sharks and the Nashville Predators sent on a short tour to Europe, the experts of the leading North American media outlets covering the NHL championship, like ESPN or TSN, seem to have had to get rid of the developed over the years habits. The layouts in the hockey league have always been a rather shaky thing, ready to fail at any moment. But still, before the start of the next championship, people who are well versed in the intricacies of hockey, as a rule, managed to draw up a more or less reliable “paper” hierarchy of its participants: here is a small group of obvious favorites who are simply obliged to hunt for the Stanley Cup, here is a layer of teams that can, with a good combination of circumstances, present a loud surprise, here are modest middle peasants with a ceiling in the form of getting into the playoffs, but absolutely hopeless outsiders.

Now everything is much more complicated, and instead of such classifications, which lay everything out clearly on the shelves, specific ratings are in trend. They identify, for example, the main candidates for take-off and failure, clubs, about the potential of which there are most questions. From unambiguous division into strong and weak analysts flatly refuse.

And there is nothing strange in this, given what happened in the NHL in the summer. Personnel turnover in it is a constant, but this off-season it was somehow especially stormy. The NHL clubs seemed to be off the chain, signing free agents who played for competitors, acquiring them in Europe, exchanging players. There were a total of about three hundred deals across 32 teams, and some of them featured hockey players with star brilliance and excellent statistics, fresh or from the recent past - Johnny Gaudreau and Matthew Tkachak, Jonathan Huberdeau and Claude Giroud, Alex Debrinkat and Brent Burns , Max Pacioretti and Nazem Kadri, Jon Klingberg and David Perron, Darcy Kemper and Ondrej Palat. And now, let's say, it's hard to get rid of the temptation to re-qualify the Detroit Red Wings, who lured a whole squad of good fighters, from a weakling, not swinging to the playoffs, into a candidate for a breakthrough, and the Calgary Flames, who had just sparkled with power, predict problems associated with the loss of both the strongest forwards - Gaudreau and Tkachak - and the resulting need to carry out a stylistic restructuring.

Questions that NHL experts savored with such pleasure because of their intricacies are for all clubs without exception. The finalists of the Stanley Cup, in theory automatically endowed with a favorite veil, are no exception. Both the Colorado Avalanche, which won the trophy in June, and the Tampa Bay Lightning, which lost to it after two consecutive triumphs, lost not only the core ones, those around whom absolutely everything revolves, but still important players for them: Colorado - goaltender Darcy Kemper and forwards Nazem Kadri and Andre Burakowski, Tampa Bay forward Ondrej Palat and defenseman Ryan McDonough.

The migration tsunami also affected Russian hockey players. But, oddly enough, only those who still or so far, or no longer claim a very special, or something, status. Alexander Romanov went from the Montreal Canadiens to the New York Islanders, Yevgeny Dadonov from the Vegas Golden Knights to Montreal, Vladislav Namestnikov from Dallas to Tampa, and from the Washington Capitals to Toronto - Ilya Samsonov, and from Toronto to Vancouver Canucks - Ilya Mikheev: he will help to adapt to the Canadian club, who previously played for SKA striker Andrei Kuzmenko. Kuzmenko, along with a young goalkeeper from the same St. Petersburg club, Yaroslav Askarov, whom Nashville believed in, are apparently the most interesting among the domestic newcomers to the NHL.

But the most famous and brightest of fifty Russian players are in place, and with them - forwards Nikita Kucherov, Alexander Ovechkin, Artemy Panarin, Kirill Kaprizov, Evgeny Malkin, Vladimir Tarasenko, Valery Nichushkin, Andrey Svechnikov, goalkeepers Igor Shesterkin and Andrey Vasilevsky - how usually, there are a bunch of intriguing moments. The role of Kucherov and Vasilevsky in Tampa, the responsibility that lies with them, seems to have become even more significant, taking into account her losses, and Evgeni Malkin and Valery Nichushkin need to prove that the Pittsburgh Penguins and Colorado did not in vain extended with them in the summer contracts on extremely good terms. From Shesterkin, recognized as the best goalkeeper of the past season, and Panarin are expected to continue the exploits, largely thanks to which the New York Rangers turned from a raw team into a team with grand manners, capable of reaching the semifinals of the Stanley Cup, and from Kaprizov - a statistical breakthrough : the thought of him is suggested by 108 recruited by him in the previous, only the second season for him in the NHL. The clubs of Svechnikov and Tarasenko - the Carolina Hurricanes and the St. Louis Blues - appear on almost all lists of those who can shoot "from an ambush", and whether or not the jump will take place depends, among other things, on the tone of their Russian attack leaders.

And finally, there is a separate attraction, which is loved by everyone who cares about the NHL. It consists of watching Washington Capitals fan idol Alexander Ovechkin near the top of the shortlist of the league's top shooters of all time. Ovechkin has just turned 37, but there is hardly anyone who considers his age an obstacle to climb: 50 goals scored by him in the regular season that preceded the current one, in any case, such a thesis is completely refuted. Now he is third in this race with 780 goals. Wayne Gretzky, who heads it, is still 114 goals away, but another Canadian hockey god, Gordie Howe, is already only 21 goals away. Apparently, Howe is about to be behind the Russian god.

Alexey Dospekhov



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