No Kovalchuk, no problem
Devils even series without top scorer
Sergei Fedorov defected in Seattle during the 1990 Goodwill Games, and he used his first signing bonus to get a two-bedroom apartment and a Corvette, and it was still all very difficult. He was the second Soviet hockey player to leave; Alexander Mogilny was the first, in 1989 in Stockholm. They were following in the haunted footsteps of violinists and ballerinas, playwrights and scientists, mathematicians and chess masters. Russia was a hard place to leave; North America was a hard place to be.
“[Russian players] come to this country and obviously, we took some — I want to put it so people understand it nicely — we took some, let’s say, top positions in every team because of our talent, and coaches wants us to perform, and it’s never been easy,” Fedorov said in a 2009 interview. “We sacrificed a lot, and we certainly bent over backwards to make it work. Especially early generation, we know we cannot come back to our home country, which is saddest and most lonely thing you can ever imagine.
“This generation of players knows that they can come back. And they miss home a lot after a long season, after hearing maybe only English and dealing with issues that a long season presents, and travel presents. It’s not easy.”
Right now it remains difficult. It has been a tumultuous Russian spring in the NHL, for an array of reasons. But it may not just be a Russian problem, precisely.
“I don’t think it’s anything to do with [being Russian],” says New Jersey Devils forward Alexei Ponikarovsky, who was born in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic. “I think it’s either bad luck or injuries or circumstances that maybe bring that kind of impression, I would say. For sure. You take [the Russian stars affected], all those years before that, everyone has up and down. After a black stripe, there’s a white stripe.”
Some people are using this difficult stretch to paint black stripes with broad brushes, and Don Cherry hasn’t even weighed in yet. Evgeni Malkin of Pittsburgh is out of the playoffs after delivering a subpar series littered with sneaky, even dirty headshots; Pavel Datsyuk of Detroit is gone as well, though with rather more class. Washington star Alexander Ovechkin has seen his ice time yanked around, but mostly down, and played a career-low 13:36 in Game 2 against the New York Rangers, though he scored the winning goal; New Jersey’s Ilya Kovalchuk played through what the club called a lower-body injury for several games before finally being rested for Game 2 Tuesday night against Philadelphia.
Then, in the one that the Don Cherrys of the world will seize upon, Nashville forward Alexander Radulov and teammate Andrei Kostitsyn, who is from Belarus, another old Soviet state, were reportedly spotted out partying at 4 a.m. in Scottsdale, Ariz., before Game 2 of their series with the Phoenix Coyotes — a series in which Radulov has been particularly dreadful. They were suspended by the club for a crucial Game 3 at home on Wednesday. Radulov only rejoined the Predators in March, they say, to burn the last year on his entry-level deal, which he left behind when he departed for the Russia-based Kontinental Hockey League in 2008.
At this rate of Russian woe, Philadelphia goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov will be lucky if he’s not eaten by a bear.
Add in the report that Washington Capitals prospect Evgeny Kuznetsov remains that team’s Godot, and has agreed to spend another two years in Russia after being told he had to do so to make the 2014 Olympic team in Sochi. Similarly, St. Louis prospect and world junior captain Vladimir Tarasenko will not come. And with three of this year’s top five Chl-based prospects being Russian — Nail Yakupov, Alex Galchenyuk and Mikhail Grigorenko — there are already reports that teams such as Columbus could trade topfive picks rather than risk the stereotypically moody, enigmatic, vanishing . . . oh, you know, the Alexander Semins of this world.
But this is not that, is it? There are genuine questions about the KHL, which can provide money and familiarity for some players. It is a place that has been touched by tragedy and criminality, but for some Russian players it is home.
In these playoffs, meanwhile, Russia has been unlucky, rather than unreliable. Yes, Radulov is what Russians call “a tower without the roof,” as Russian journalist Slava Malamud roughly translates it; he is considered a talent without a compass, and therefore a risk. He is the example of why deep background research is necessary, but the Predators had to know he was a significant risk when they brought him back. They went all-in, as they put it, and Radulov is a bad card.
But Kovalchuk was playing 25-27 minutes per game with what the Newark Star-ledger reported was a serious back injury. That’s toughness. Malkin was the best player in the league this season, unless it was Datsyuk. Ovechkin is his own opera, it’s true. Russian reporters say he hasn’t even spoken Russian in public for months, and that the perception of him back home is souring.
Russians, in other words, can be complex, in all different ways. There are documented cases of mob shake downs. There is the KHL. There is the language, the development, and a small crop of hockey artists that can be difficult to put in what has become, more and more, the North American hockey box. There is a higher risk in Russian players, but they’re no more all of the same mind than Canadians are. Sean Avery’s one of ours, you know.
But they are still aliens here. Some things, as the playwrights tell us, do not change.