Tampa Bay forward Nikita Kucherov scored nine points in two games

Russian Tampa Bay Lightning forward Nikita Kucherov, already at the start of the NHL regular season, very loudly declared his claims to the title of his top scorer. He added four more points to his five points against the Ottawa Senators last weekend against the Toronto Maple Leafs. Kucherov’s form, however, is one of the few trump cards of today’s Tampa, which, despite his achievements, lost to Toronto and now has a negative balance of victories and defeats.

The matchup between Toronto and Tampa Bay was a hit for two reasons. The first is its interesting plot. After the opening period, it seemed that the hosts were doomed. “Tampa” responded to their early goal with four of its own, took the lead with a huge advantage and removed Russian goalkeeper Ilya Samsonov, who clearly felt out of place, to the bench. But, as it turned out, the intrigue was not dead yet. “Toronto” slowly came to its senses, equalized the score and even took the lead in the final period. He did not maintain this advantage, but in overtime Kalle Jarnkruk still brought him the win.

The second reason is the personal performance of Nikita Kucherov. The leader of Tampa’s attack scored four points in this match, having a hand in all the goals that his team scored in that very starting period. Kucherov distinguished himself twice and assisted his partners twice. Adding to the brilliance of this outburst from Nikita Kucherov was the fact that he gave an equally thunderous performance in the previous meeting last weekend. Before her, Kucherov had an unimportant period – two points for assists in four matches. But Tampa coach John Cooper made some adjustments in the lines, and the Russian forward broke through. In the game against the Ottawa Senators, he scored five points (a goal and four assists), while his club hit the opponents’ goal six times in total, winning with a score of 6:4. And now a new personal feat.

He looks very much like a confident bid for the championship in the regular season scoring race.

Nikita Kucherov is now tied for second place with 20 points with brothers Jack and Quinn Hughes, who play for the New Jersey Devils and Vancouver Canucks.

But the gap from another Vancouver player at the top, Elias Pettersson, is purely symbolic – one point. At the same time, Kucherov has much more goals scored than the Swedish forward – nine versus six.

And there are a couple more nuances that raise prices for Nikita Kucherov. In 2019, according to the results of the regular season, he already received the NHL scoring prize – the Art Ross Trophy, along with which he then received a prize for simply the strongest hockey player of the championship. In that championship, Kucherov had 128 points – a figure that looked grandiose, a record for the century. So, now the striker is on schedule, ahead of the schedule five years ago. When projected over the full championship distance of 82 matches, his current figure turns into as much as 137 points.

This is still less than Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers, who beat Nikita Kucherov’s achievement last season, with 153 points. However, the current McDavid started the season completely unimpressively. He doesn’t have much going for him, and his performance compared to Kucherov’s performance is extremely modest – ten points.

At the same time, one cannot ignore the fact that Nikita Kucherov’s tone is one of the few bright spots of today’s Tampa. The club, which won the Stanley Cup in 2020 and 2021, and reached the playoff final in 2022, is still playing rather hard. Formally, everything is not so bad for him in terms of tournament position – third place in the Atlantic Division behind the Boston Bruins and Detroit Red Wings. But this division is incredibly dense in composition, the gaps between teams are minimal. Meanwhile, Tampa has practically no matches in which it destroys or crushes its opponents. The club suffers all the time and currently has a negative balance of wins and losses – five to seven. It helps that Tampa suffered four of its defeats in overtime, and overtime is, whatever one may say, a point even in case of failure.

But there’s no getting away from the feeling that, no matter what Nikita Kucherov’s form is, the team needs reinforcement in order to more or less calmly break into the playoffs. However, the option with reinforcement is also on the surface. This is the return to action of another core Russian player, goalkeeper Andrei Vasilevsky, who underwent surgery on an injured back. It should take place by December.

Alexey Dospehov