`HE'S A HUGE MAN RIGHT NOW IN BELARUS'
Flames' Sharangovich has countryman swelling with pride after tying record
Nobody's cheering harder for Yegor Sharangovich than Mikhail Grabovski.
The retired NHLER has held the record for most points in an NHL season by a Belarusian player since 2010-11, when he put up 58 points with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
In his first season with the Calgary Flames, Sharangovich has tied that mark and is sure to claim the record as his own with three games to go. And Grabovski couldn't be happier about it.
“I'm happy for the whole country,” Grabovski said. “Of course I'm proud.
“He can score 50 goals, I wish him luck with it.”
Grabovski and Sharangovich have a friendship that dates back several years now.
They meet up for dinner whenever Sharangovich is playing in Toronto and Grabovski even brought his son out to Calgary earlier this season to watch the Flames play. Sharangovich gave them a locker-room tour and showed them both around the Saddledome.
If anyone's going to break a record you hold, you'd probably want it to be a friend, right?
And for Grabovski, it's absolutely not a surprise that Sharangovich is the one who is about to become Belarus' top single-season scorer.
The two aren't just friends, after all. Grabovski was actually an assistant coach for Dynamo Minsk back in 2020-21 when Sharangovich, then with the New Jersey Devils' AHL affiliate, went back home on loan to get some games in.
“He wants to learn, he's smart, he understands what you want him to do,” Grabovski said.
“He's a reliable player, when you tell him you want him to do something on the ice, he does that stuff. He listens to you and compared to other players who I train, he absorbs information and he learns.
“We'd have dinner and I'd tell him `Be strong, play your role, practise hard and everything's going to be good for you.' He's a guy who listens always, he's a great student.”
For Sharangovich, listening to a guy like Grabovski was a no-brainer. No Belarusian has more than the 296 points that Grabovski put up in his 534 game NHL career, after all. He's a big deal for hockey players back in Belarus.
And as Flames teammates Ilya Solovyov explained last week, the same can be said about Sharangovich these days.
“Everybody watches him right now,” Solovyov said. “I don't know how to say it in English, but the young guys look at him and they want to be like Sharan right now. They want to be in the NHL and they want to score 30 goals. He's a huge man right now in Belarus.”
Sharangovich has become a big story in Calgary, too. After being acquired by the Flames in the trade that sent Tyler Toffoli to the New Jersey Devils last summer, the 25-year-old has quickly established himself as one of the team's most important players.
He became the first Belarusian player to score 30 goals in a season and with his next point will pass Grabovski for the record.
So yeah, it's been a pretty great first season in Calgary.
Grabovski firmly believes there's more to come, too.
“I always tell him when I watch the games, you need to keep the puck even more, you're capable of taking the puck and going to the net yourself,” Grabovski said. “He played for us for Dynamo Minsk that year and it helped me to work with him and I think it helped him a little to develop and make his shot faster, because he used to have a long shot, it was a bad habit from when the game was slow and you had time.
“I'd tell him all the time `In the NHL, you don't have time, make your shot short, quick, put the puck close to your skate and shoot.' I think he absorbed that information, I don't think I helped him that much, but a little bit.”