Pavel Datsyuk turned 35 today. Why not take a moment to remember some of his brilliance?
Pavel Datsyuk, twice a Stanley Cup champion in 14 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings, celebrates his 45th birthday today.
Datsyuk, born in Sverdlorsk in the Soviet Union, broke into the NHL at 23 in the 2001-02 season, having spent the year prior with Kazan in the Russian Super League. In the years between his birth in 1978 and his final season of professional hockey in 2020-21, Sverdlorsk had been renamed Yekaterinburg, the Soviet Union became Russia, and the Russian Super League had re-invented itself as the Kontinental Hockey League.
What didn't change? Well, Datsyuk still had the silkiest set of hands anywhere between the Rocky Mountains and the Urals. You couldn't take the puck off him in a phone booth, he could cut back on you to buy time whenever he pleased, and Robert Oppenheimer would really have been agonizing about the unbridled power of his creations if he'd had to cope with breathing life into Datsyuk's backhand.
"He doesn't speak English, but he is the sickest player I've ever seen in my life," said Brett Hull of the young Datsyuk who broke into the NHL. Hull, one of nine Hall-of-Famers on that stacked '02 Red Wing team (with Datsyuk himself not yet eligible), was speaking for the top 100 players list the NHL put together to help celebrate its centennial.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpf1rWjR9S4[/embed]
Perhaps what's most amazing about Datsyuk is that as mesmerizing and alien as he was to those of us who watched him as fans, his brilliance was even more confounding and awe-inspiring to his peers.
Another future Hall-of-Famer of that fabled '02 Red Wing team was Luc Robitaille who recalls a young Datsyuk as an almost monastic figure, saying "I remember guys talking about him at camp. He was this little guy. None of us had ever seen a guy play with the puck the way he did."
Chris Osgood, then playing for the St. Louis Blues, recalls the way it was little fourth line Pavel Datsyuk—not Hull or Robitaille or Sergei Fedorov or Steve Yzerman—who used to give Norris-winning defenseman Chris Pronger fits when the Wings and Blues got together.
If he only played a bit part in 2002, Datsyuk was one of the front men for the Red Wings' 2008 Cup victory, by which point he had established himself as the most dazzling and creative player in the game, as well as its most dominant 200-foot player. Whether the currency you trafficked in was highlights or advanced stats, Datsyuk occupied the most rarefied of NHL air.
In a 2012 player poll, conducted by the NHLPA and CBC, Datsyuk was named the league's smartest player, the cleanest player to play against, the toughest player to take the puck from, the toughest forward to play against, the player that's the hardest to stop, and the hardest overall player to play against. In the truest sense, he was your favorite player's favorite player.
His magnificence gave rise to the eponymous "Datsyukian deke," which applied most specifically to a particular breakaway/shootout move that combined a shot fake with a backhand toe draw, first deployed to cruel and lethal effect against poor Marty Turco in 2003 but the term could be used more broadly to describe any time he reduced a professional hockey player to a pitiable state with his sleight of hand.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB-O8n3WA9A[/embed]
There was the time Anti Niemi was expecting a fastball in a 2010 shootout in Detroit, but Datsyuk threw a change-up:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdioAO_XXZQ[/embed]
There was the time he dropped a young Logan Couture to his knees with a pullback move in 2013:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xi_VPImyJM[/embed]
By the time he returned to Russia and the KHL in 2016, there was nothing left to prove. Besides the pair of Cups, Datsyuk had claimed four Lady Byng Trophies as the league's most gentlemanly player and three Selkes as its top defensive forward.
As if that weren't enough, he would join the Triple Gold Club by winning the gold medal at the 2018 Olympics with the dubiously named Olympic Athletes from Russia. He would play his last game in 2021, for Yekaterinburg Automobilist back in his hometown, and officially announce his retirement in the summer of 2022.
My personal favorite compilation of Datsyuk's works (and I assure you I've spent more than a little time perusing the various offerings) is titled "Pavel Datsyuk-The King of Stickhandling 2," but don't worry, you don't have to have seen the original to get the sequel.
So, today, on the Magic Man's 45th birthday, what better way to celebrate than by looking back on his extraterrestrial set of hands that never knew an NHL home other than Detroit. Happy birthday, Pavel, and thank you for gracing us with your other worldly hands.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHxlzJPevxQ[/embed]