Veterans don’t age like a trap – Kommersant
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The main surprise of the opening segment of the second round of the NHL playoffs was two consecutive away wins won by the Florida Panthers over the Toronto Maple Leafs. One of Florida’s key success factors was the performance of famous Russian goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, who experienced an unexpected career renaissance, played a crucial role in the second game, in which he saved three and a half dozen shots and which his club won 3-2.
Two wins at the start of the series, even away wins, are not a guarantee of overall victory. The current Stanley Cup has already given confirmation of this thesis. In the opening round, the New Jersey Devils started the series just as unsuccessfully with the New York Rangers – and nothing, got out. And Florida itself knows from its own experience that such a gap is not a sentence. She was inferior in the first round – 1:3 – to the terrible champion of the regular season, the Boston Bruins, but she was able to go further. And yet, two away victories are, whatever one may say, a colossal backlog. Such a backlog that you can squander it only by trying very hard. And the fact that now it is Florida that is the absolute favorite of the confrontation, in which, no matter how effectively it coped with Boston, at first its opponent was quoted higher. Toronto has already knocked out Tampa, no less powerful than the Bostonians, with its three Stanley Cup finals in a row on a resume, and its chic set of sharpest forwards – Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, Ryan O’Reilly and John Tavares, William Nylander and Michael Banting seemed to guarantee serious problems for the opponent with his unstable defense.
One of the factors that provided Florida with a breakthrough, meanwhile, catches the eye right off the bat. And this factor has a first and last name – Sergey Bobrovsky.
Bobrovsky is apparently the most famous among the Russian hockey players who survived the second round of the playoffs. He twice, in 2013 and 2017, while a player of the Columbus Blue Jackets, received the award for the best goaltender in the NHL, was among the participants in the All-Star Game. And the fact that now he is helping Florida a lot would not have caused any surprise, if not for one nuance.
The heyday of Sergei Bobrovsky took place when he was young. At his peak, in 2019, she saw in him a chance to rise to the level of the Florida giants, signing a seven-year contract worth $ 70 million with the Russian, under the conditions for goalkeepers. But soon there was a feeling that the club, taking such a risk, miscalculated. Entering the veteran phase, Bobrovsky, who is now 34 years old, was no longer as good as in his youth. Recently, he has finally ceased to be considered the frontman of at least a single expanded Russian goaltending corps in the NHL. These roles were transferred to Andrei Vasilevsky, Igor Shesterkin, Ilya Sorokin. And in the current season, in general, it seemed that a catastrophic fall happened.
Before the playoffs, it was the goalie issue that worried Florida fans the most, and not by chance. In the regular season, Bobrovsky’s breakdowns became commonplace, and in the end he was seated on the bench by the inexperienced and, frankly, non-sparkling Alex Lyon. But he still looked like a more reliable option.
Helped misfortune. After the first two matches with Boston, the Florida management and coach Paul Maurice realized that Lion, under conditions of extreme responsibility and extreme pressure, was not pulling the playoffs, and they returned Sergey Bobrovsky to the goal, and he suddenly showed that he was written off early from accounts. Not to say that he did something extraordinary, but at least almost always helped out at key moments, including in the most difficult situations.
In this sense, the second match against Toronto was extremely revealing. The hosts in it were dispersed so briskly – two goals in five minutes, that one would think that they would wipe Florida into powder. But it was not there. The not-so-bad attack of the guests slowly flared up, already in the second period bringing them forward, and with abandoned washers at Toronto, whose gates were defended by another Russian, Ilya Samsonov, it stopped developing. Partly due to bad luck (we are talking, for example, about the bars that interfered with Nylander and Tavares), but mostly because of Bobrovsky.
A colossal load fell on his share: 37 shots of Toronto hit the target (for Samsonov, it was much more modest – 29 shots). And most importantly, a significant part of them posed a real threat, some mortal. Bobrovsky, having conceded twice in the opening, then beat off everything that flew in his direction – with a trap, a club, shields, once even with a mask, from a long distance and after executions, actually point-blank, as in the episode with Tavares’ attack … And it was clear how everyone his new feat makes the Toronto players nervous, fussy, pisses them off, depriving them of composure and provoking mistakes, like that loss out of the blue that led to Florida’s third goal, it is possible that he ruined the mighty Canadian team.
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