From The Archive: GREATNESS IN THE SHADOW

Original author: Ken Campbell: Jul. 17, 2017

When he coached the Pittsburgh Penguins, Dan Bylsma regularly referred to Evgeni Malkin as the smartest guy in the room. On this night, he was probably also the happiest. And that’s saying something because it was a very big room. There was Yevgeni Vladimirovich Malkin, son of a steelworker from working-class Magnitogorsk, standing at center ice of Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, basking in the glow of winning his third career Stanley Cup and the Penguins’ second straight, cementing the team’s and the player’s places in the annals of the game.

He had a cut across the bridge of his nose that was leaking slowly, not a battle scar but an accidental nick from a teammate’s visor that hit him during the celebration, a touch ironic considering Malkin was the postseason leader in penalty minutes. He didn’t have it moments before when he was jumping around like a little kid on the bench with Phil Kessel to celebrate Carl Hagelin’s empty-net goal. “It’s like, it’s crazy, you know,” Malkin said. “It’s not a penalty for sure.”

Then, like Adrian did in the first Rocky movie, Anna Kasterova made her way through the mass of humanity and jumped into her husband’s arms. He twirled her around on his skates and they kissed. But this wasn’t one of those ‘we-did-itand- look-how-happy-we-are’ pecks for public consumption. No, Kasterova took her husband’s sweaty, bearded face in her hands and the two of them went all Bogie and Bacall. It was the kind of kiss that makes people start looking down at their shoes after a while, the type of PDA (Public Display of Affection) that makes someone want to wisecrack, “Hey, get a room!”

The record shows Malkin received only three first-place votes for the 2017 Conn Smythe Trophy, despite being the playoff scoring leader, once again usurped by the omnipresent Sidney Crosby, who unseated Malkin by putting the Penguins on his back in the last two games of the Stanley Cup final. Until then, it looked as though Malkin was going to win his second Conn Smythe and become only the second player in history to go at least seven years between being named playoff MVP, joining Patrick Roy. After the game, the Penguins were talking about Crosby earning his place as one of the greatest NHL players of all-time (more on that on page 66). Malkin, meanwhile, couldn’t even get his name on the league’s list of the top 100 players of all-time earlier this season.

We’re going to assume he was No. 101. We’re also going to assume it doesn’t bother him in the least. As teammate Ian Cole said, “Do I think he’s broken up over it? No. I don’t think he’s constantly going home and crying himself to sleep that he wasn’t part of the top 100.”

Looking at Malkin that night in Nashville, beaming with his beautiful wife, you’d have to think the lack of recognition was the furthest thing from his mind. Nobody looked happier than he did. A lot of people in Pittsburgh were upset he wasn’t on the NHL’s top 100 list, but he wasn’t one of them. As he said on Media Day before the Stanley Cup final, in what was probably the longest interview of his career, “No, I don’t care. My record is Cups.”

And now he has three of ’em, the third as part of the first team to win two in a row in the salary cap era. Add that to his Calder Trophy – something Crosby never won – a Hart Trophy, two Art Ross Trophies and a Conn Smythe Trophy, and you have a player who has managed to carve out his legacy while skating in the shadow of one of the greatest players ever. Perhaps that’s why Malkin was so happy standing there at center ice in Nashville. But maybe it was because the 30-year-old was looking at his life and realizing things may never be better than they were at that precise moment. Since May of last year, he has won two Stanley Cups, become a father for the first time and married the woman he fell in love with after seeing her on TV. “He’s a very romantic man,” said Kasterova with the help of an interpreter, “and he loves me very much.”

It was five years ago that Malkin was watching television in Moscow during the off-season and was instantly smitten by the woman doing sports. He frantically began his quest to find her, including getting in touch with every Russian journalist he knew in an effort to get her phone number. “He see me on television and, ‘Wow!’ ” Kasterova said. “He text me and say, ‘I’m Malkin, can I text you maybe sometimes because you’re very nice.’ For two years we text as friends, and after two years we are together.”

They went on their first date to a sushi restaurant in Moscow and fell in love almost instantly. And now with Nikita, they are three. When he talks about his son, you can see the pride on Malkin’s face, and Kasterova lauds him for being a loving and caring father. For all he’s done in the game, Malkin wants to make sure he does right by his children. Fatherhood has been a life-changing experience for him. He kisses his boy every day before he goes to the rink and takes an immense amount of joy in his son’s milestones, proudly declaring Nikita recently learned to walk.

“This year I go out zero times,” Malkin said. “I stay home and when we have an extra day in New York, I tell coach, ‘Let’s go home.’ I was so excited when my wife was pregnant. I can’t wait to see my son and now I want more. He’s not my last for sure. I try to be good dad, not just good hockey dad. Hockey life is short, like 20 years, but after it’s, like, be a good dad.”

Until then, though, Malkin will try to be a good NHL player, too. He has at least five more years to do so before his current contract expires. By that time he’ll be 35, and he’ll have made slightly more than $131 million. The Hall of Fame will wait three more years for him if that’s when he decides to retire. He’ll have more babies by then, and maybe one or two more Cups, as well as a few more individual honors. Who knows? He may even have made his way into the top 100 players of alltime by then. But even if none of that happens, Malkin has built a legacy in Pittsburgh behind Crosby, forming a 1-2 punch at center that rivals Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier, Steve Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov, Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg.

“I really believe in just my time here with both guys, they’ve grown to be appreciative for one another and how they help each other have success and this team,” said Penguins coach Mike Sullivan. “And so when there are nights when maybe Sid might not have his ‘A’ game, that Geno steps up and helps this team win, and vice versa. There are other nights where Geno might not have his ‘A’ game and Sid steps up and makes a big play to help this team win. They’re two players of a very select few in the league that singlehandedly have an ability to change the outcomes of games. That’s how good they are. I think I termed it a 1-2 punch maybe, but it’s really a 1 and 1A. These guys, they’re elite players. They’re great people, and I don’t know that you could find two better people to build a team around than these two guys.”

Like those other great tandems, Malkin and Crosby are two entirely different players, but they complement each other perfectly. If Malkin harbors any resentment from the lack of recognition he gets because of Crosby, there’s no indication of it. In fact, you could argue that as Crosby sits at his stall after every practice and game and handles the crush of questions with aplomb and patience, he’s actually helping Malkin, who gets to go about his business quietly and without distraction. He can go out to the back and work on his sticks with a smile on his face and not a care in the world. If Malkin were the alpha dog somewhere else, that wouldn’t be the case.

“I don’t want to be like No. 1 in Carolina or something,” Malkin said. “I feel like the guy here, too. I come to a restaurant and people want to shake hands and it’s fun for me. I sign a big deal here because I feel we can win every year here. I want to play with Sid a long time. It’s good competition between me and Sid. Sid score, I want to score, too. Sid score one more, I want to score one more, too. Sid score a hat trick, I stop.”

Everyone got a good laugh out of that one. Malkin is a funny, engaging guy, as he proved on Media Day, taking questions for nearly half an hour and discussing everything from hockey to fatherhood to dealing with people throwing octopi and catfish on the ice. Sitting over at the next pod, Crosby took notice, saying it was nice to see Malkin under the spotlight for a change.

“He does a pretty good job of staying away,” Crosby said. “He and Phil (Kessel) usually throw it on me and on my stall and head out of there. You guys probably fired him up with some good questions, and I’m sure he loved it.”

When Bylsma was coaching in Pittsburgh, he got to see that dynamic closer than anyone. He’d watch as he gave instructions, and it’d look as though Malkin wasn’t paying attention. Bylsma would then test him, asking what should be done in a specific situation, and Malkin would answer perfectly every time. He’d watch Malkin play cards with Sergei Gonchar on the plane and beat him nine out of 10 times. He saw him read complex books that were written in both Russian and English and saw a player who was reclusive for public consumption but one who spoke freely and wisely among his teammates.

“I almost felt like he was ahead of everyone else in the room,” Bylsma said.

Jim Rutherford scanned up and down the list the first time and frowned. Picture him with an index finger on his chin, the other hand lifting his glasses to his forehead and back down to his eyes a couple times, lurching ahead to get a closer look at the screen. He looked again, this time a little more closely, and couldn’t believe what he wasn’t seeing. He realized the players were listed in alphabetical order and zoned in on the M’s. Now imagine Rutherford taking off his glasses and breathing on both lenses before wiping them clean with the cuff of his shirt. As the reality dawned on him that Malkin wasn’t on the NHL’s list of the top 100 players of all-time, Rutherford tried to put aside his biases as Penguins GM. He considered the body of work and came to the only logical conclusion he could.

“I looked at the list,” Rutherford recalled, “and I’m thinking to myself, ‘This can’t be right.’ ”

Rutherford did come to accept the reality, but it stung. And it was made all the more awkward by the fact Rutherford was part of the “blue-ribbon” panel that had input into the final list. Hall of Fame defenseman Pierre Pilote would also have been on his list, but it was Malkin’s omission that had him feeling so conflicted. As his GM, Rutherford would have loved to come out swinging and defend his player. Yet as a part of the group that chose the players, he had to tread softly.

“Yeah, I had to be careful because I was part of the panel, and I didn’t want to say a whole lot at the time because I was upset for Geno and I didn’t want to go against the panel,” he said. “But yeah, I was upset.”

For Rutherford, it’s not about the here and now. It’s about 50 or 100 years down the road when someone who never saw Malkin play looks at that list and doesn’t see his name on it. “People will look back on history and they’ll look at the top 100 and they won’t find a player who, in my opinion, you could make an argument should be in the top 50, let alone the top 100. And that’s where you get disappointed about it.”

Bylsma watched Malkin play for five years, which were the most productive of his career. Bylsma witnessed greatness. He saw a player who elevated his game when Crosby was out of the lineup. He saw a player who rehabbed three times a day from knee surgery during the first round of the playoffs in 2011, watching while his team lost in seven games to the Tampa Bay Lightning. Malkin had been told his season was over, and there was no way he was going to play regardless of how far the Penguins advanced, but he kept working out in the hopes of coming back early. He apologized to then-GM Ray Shero for getting injured at such a crucial time of the year.

“It’s certainly hard to pick the best 100 in the game, and there are people who, without question, should be in the top 100,” Bylsma said. “But Evgeni should be in the top 100.”

Almost everyone who knows Malkin claims that being left off the list doesn’t matter to him. Bylsma often heard Malkin say that he honestly cares about nothing more than winning the Stanley Cup, so we’re going to take them at their word and Malkin at his. But everyone has at least a bit of an ego, no? We all want to be recognized for what we have accomplished. Gonchar, who is now the Penguins’ defensemen development coach, might know Malkin better than anyone else, and he’s not so sure Malkin didn’t care about the snub.

“I think pissed off probably wouldn’t be the right word,” Gonchar said. “He was probably more motivated and that gave him an extra push. He’s a very competitive guy, and people might not notice that about him.”

When the Penguins won their second of two straight Stanley Cups in 1992, they had seven future Hall of Fame players (that includes Jaromir Jagr) and a blueline that featured Paul Coffey, Larry Murphy and Ulf Samuelsson. This year, Crosby and Malkin were the only surefire Hall of Famers, and the back end looked nothing like it did 25 years ago. With Kris Letang out with an injury, Pittsburgh won with six nondescript defensemen, led by Brian Dumoulin, who seemed to be held together with balls of string, wire and duct tape while averaging almost 22 minutes a game. Ron Hainsey, who turned 36 just before the end of the regular season and went into the playoffs with 907 games of NHL experience without a single post-season appearance, combined with Dumoulin to be the team’s shutdown tandem.

The Penguins’ back-to-back Stanley Cups couldn’t have been more impressive given the adversity and injuries they faced this season. They won games they shouldn’t have – some on sheer talent, others on the strength of their goaltending, guile and grit. They were outshot regularly and confounded the analytics community. They were hardly the perfect champions, but in the end they had a parade in Pittsburgh that, like back in the day in Montreal, followed the usual route.

This was indeed a special group. It was led through the first two rounds by a veteran goalie with a checkered playoff history, a guy who already knew he wouldn’t even be in Pittsburgh next season. In the hours after the Penguins’ victory, it was reported Marc-Andre Fleury had waived his no-trade clause and would be available to the Vegas Golden Knights in the expansion draft, giving Pittsburgh the luxury of protecting its goalie of the present and the future, 23-yearold Matt Murray.

The Penguins faced a Columbus Blue Jackets team in the first round that tried to run them out of the rink. They failed. Then came the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Washington Capitals, who executed their annual second-round choke job but not before wearing Pittsburgh down over seven games and dealing a blow to Crosby, a “hockey play” in which he was double-slashed by Alex Ovechkin before being cross-checked in the face and drilled in the knee by Matt Niskanen.

Then came another seven-game series, this time against the Ottawa Senators, who ground their way to double overtime in the deciding game. Before the final, Malkin acknowledged that penetrating the Predators’ vaunted defense corps “is going to be the hardest challenge of my life,” and after it was over, it looked every bit that difficult. By the time the Penguins faced the Predators, many thought they were running on fumes, and in the first four games, it looked as though they were doing just that. But those were powerful fumes, and the extra day off between games energized them.

When Nick Bonino went down in Game 2 with what was later disclosed as a broken leg – though not before returning to finish the game a la Bobby Baun – Pittsburgh was limping its way to the finish line. When the Penguins won their first Cup in 1991, Mario Lemieux had to have the trainers tie his skates for him because his back was in such bad shape that he couldn’t do it himself. The team had to build him a special bed in his hotel room on the road just so he could get some sleep. So, this Penguins group didn’t have the market cornered on overcoming adversity.

Any team that plays 82 games in a season and 25 more in the spring has to navigate any number of obstacles. But what this team did and how it managed to win the war of attrition was something to behold.

“I always use the phrase that I think we’re a scrappy group,” Sullivan said. “It’s not always pretty, but this group is resilient. We’re scrappy, we’re competitive. We just stay with it. There’s a stick-to-it-iveness that this group has, and they believe in one another. This team, I think, has a unique chemistry. They’re a great group of people, and they enjoy playing for one another. These guys are a privilege to coach. We push them so hard because we think so highly of them.”

There were many times the Penguins could have withered. They looked dead in the water after blowing a 3-1 series lead to the Capitals and appeared almost on life support after being blown out in Games 3 and 4 against Nashville. In Game 2 against the Senators, Malkin and Kessel grew frustrated with each other and it boiled over on the bench, forcing Sullivan to come over to Malkin and calm him down.

Kessel later scored the pivotal goal to deliver a victory, and everyone brushed it off afterward. But it also went a long way to proving that Crosby isn’t the only player on the team whose competitive fires burn white hot. It turns out Kessel gets amped up on occasion, and Malkin’s emotional well runs deeply, too. Consider that Malkin has been in a total of seven fights in his career, with more of them coming in the playoffs (four) than the regular season (three).

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In 2016-17, Malkin reached another milestone. By winning his third Stanley Cup, he tied Sergei Fedorov and Igor Larionov for the highest total by a Russian player. He sits seventh among Russian players on the NHL’s all-time scoring list, but there’s no reason why he can’t climb to third, perhaps even second, though that will take some doing since he’s more than 300 points behind Fedorov. It depends on how long Malkin plays or if he continues beyond his current contract.

Being No. 1 will be virtually impossible, since he’s 203 points behind Ovechkin as it stands now. In points and recognition, Malkin will always remain second to Ovechkin among Russian players, even though Malkin’s name is on the Stanley Cup three times while Ovechkin may never get his on the bowl. Of all the Russians who have ever played in the NHL, Malkin leads the pack in points per game at 1.18, ahead of Ovechkin, who sits second at 1.12. Malkin needs 193 assists to become the all-time assists leader among Russian players.

It’s hard to carve out a legacy when a personality as large and dominating as Ovechkin takes up most of the space. Unlike Ovechkin, who grew up in cosmopolitan Moscow, a privileged son of a former Olympic athlete, Malkin grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in a working class city, the son of a laborer. Perhaps that’s why he’s so comfortable in Pittsburgh. Both Magnitogorsk and Pittsburgh forged their identities with steel mills and sweat, even though the booming steel days in Pittsburgh are long gone and it has become one of the Rust Belt cities that has figured out how to survive. It’s an almost perfect spot for Malkin, who gets the benefits of winning championships and being a star player without the responsibilities that come with being the face of a franchise.

So, now Malkin has his Cups. He has his wife, his family and all the money he could ever want. After the Penguins won the Cup, Sullivan said the players didn’t want anyone else writing their story for them because they aren’t finished. Murray has two Stanley Cups, and he’s only 23. Rutherford has rediscovered his mojo in Pittsburgh and, though he faces significant challenges, he has two of the most successful, clutch and decorated players in the game. And for Malkin, the people who matter most to him, his family and teammates, they know what he’s all about. Or they will.

“He has no idea I play hockey,” said Malkin of his one-year-old son. “When he grows up, like two or three years old, I hope he will be proud of me.”

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