THN Archive: Emperor Penguin
In 2011-12, Evgeni Malkin put the Pittsburgh Penguins on his back to seal his MVP season.
Sidney Crosby missed a good chunk of the 2011-12 season, but the Pittsburgh Penguins weren't down and out thanks to the work of Evgeni Malkin.
In his lone Hart Trophy season, Malkin put the Penguins on his back to make sure the team remained competitive, even without their captain.
In total, Malkin posted 50 goals and 59 assists for 109 points in 75 total games played and helped push the team to a 51-25-6 record.
The Hockey News archive digs into the brilliance of Malkin nearing a playoff push.
Ray Shero still has the text message on his cell phone. It came in the night of Feb. 4, less than a month after Sidney Crosby was shut down for God Knows How Long. It was from Evgeni Malkin, who had just left the game against the Buffalo Sabres after falling into the boards awkwardly. Things looked gruesome, particularly given the fact just about all of Tyler Myers’ 227 pounds had come down on Malkin’s right knee. Everyone suspected the worst and it turns out they were right. The message contained only two words: I’m sorry. “I’m sorry?” said the Pittsburgh Penguins GM. “I’m sorry for what? For getting hurt?”
Winston Churchill once said the price of greatness is responsibility. Evgeni Malkin can relate. It turns out the man who, until recently, never talked to the media actually carries the weight of responsibility around with him all the time. So few have seen it because Malkin has not let us into his world, but behind the quiet facade is a man who cares intensely about his craft and his hockey team. This will become more evident to us all as Malkin’s career unfolds and as he seizes more responsibility for the success of the Penguins. God forbid Crosby should miss the rest of this season or (gulp) find his long-term playing future in jeopardy, but one thing that will come of it is that Malkin will no longer be able to defer to Sid the Kid, on or off the ice.
It’s almost preposterous to say this season has been a coming-out party for a guy who has already won a Stanley Cup along with the Calder, Art Ross and Conn Smythe Trophies, but as Malkin nudged his way into being the top contender for his first Hart Trophy as MVP, the hockey world began to see a different, more committed player. Just watch his work along the walls. He rarely won battles there in the past, but is now using his size, strength and reach to emerge from corners with the puck on his stick. Case in point, a game in late January against the Washington Capitals. With Pittsburgh trailing 3-2 in the third, Malkin gained the zone and fought off Matt Hendricks and Roman Hamrlik through the slot, with the latter knocking him down. But Malkin immediately sprung back up and beat Hamrlik to the puck in the corner before feeding James Neal for the tying goal. And for good measure, he scored the overtime winner.
There are those who watch Malkin every day who claim that he is playing the best hockey of his career. And that’s saying something. Go back to tapes of the 2009 playoffs and see what we mean. Neal did not have the benefit of playing with Malkin last season and it showed. Without a center who could get him the puck, Neal scored one goal in 20 games after coming over from the Dallas Stars. Now Neal has a player who can do the heavy lifting in terms of lugging the puck up the ice and all he has to do is find the open lane. “I’ve only seen him this way,” Neal said. “I’ve never seen a guy be able to make so many moves at such high speed. He has that ability to drag guys to him and hit the open man.”
It’s reasonable to suggest that when more is asked of an athlete, the natural inclination for most of them is to step up their game. What has always been the Penguins’ strength – Crosby, Malkin and Jordan Staal down the middle – has suddenly become a concern with the long-term absences of Crosby and Staal. And whether it’s wittingly or not, Malkin has responded by being truly dominant. It must be difficult for a player to assert himself and be the focal point when Crosby is around. That might be a function of nothing more than their birth certificates, but the pressure has never been on Malkin to carry the team or to carry the mantle of being the league’s best player. Now that he’s doing it, he looks more and more comfortable all the time
And he should. This is his sixth season in the NHL and even though he didn’t have the luxury of coming from a cosmopolitan city the way Alex Ovechkin did, he could only play the part of the quiet Russian for so long. Those who know Malkin well say he has an exuberant personality and might be the most intelligent player on the Penguins. And now we’re beginning to see that shine through. During the all-star weekend in Ottawa, which was minus both Crosby and Ovechkin for the first time since the two broke into the league, Malkin looked far more comfortable being in the spotlight.
He even tweets now and has more than 128,000 followers. One of them is Troy Polamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers, a player Malkin refers to as “their best defenseman.” Most of the tweets are rather innocuous. They include pictures of his cat, Dixi, of him on a Zamboni or dressed for Halloween with a curly wig, a plume of chest hair coming out of his shirt and a bushy moustache, of him standing behind the cutout of an enormous offensive lineman. When NHL Twitter king Paul Bissonnette of the Phoenix Coyotes tweeted he would see Malkin at the All-Star Game, Malkin fired back, “sorry nasty you are play rookie game.”
Much of Malkin’s renewed vigor has to do with the injury last season, which turned out to be a torn anterior cruciate ligament, a malady that certainly isn’t as devastating as it once was in sports, but one that usually requires six months to heal. Regardless, Malkin insisted that had the Penguins managed to get by the Tampa Bay Lightning in the first round of the playoffs, he would have somehow willed himself back into the lineup for the rest of the playoff run, a mere three months after the injury. In fact, he wanted desperately to play in Game 7, which the Penguins lost, before being shut down by the organization. It was a preposterous notion, one the Penguins didn’t even begin to entertain, but it did show them how much Malkin wants to win. “In every conversation about our team and his role, it ends up with him thinking we can win a Stanley Cup and thinking how good our team is and where we can go,” said Penguins coach Dan Bylsma. “Last year he wanted to come back because he thought he could help our team win a Stanley Cup and this summer, his focus was not, ‘I want to be the best player in the league.’ It wasn’t ‘I want to win a scoring title.’ It was, ‘We gotta add more Stanley Cups.'
The Penguins knew Malkin was serious when he hired strength and conditioning coach Mike Kadar to come to Russia for two weeks to supervise his dryland and on-ice training. Two workouts a day every day with everything from kettle bells in the gym to flippers in the pool, Malkin displayed a vigilance and level of motivation few had ever seen before from him. He even admitted that early in his career he was a little bit lazy when it came to off-season conditioning, but the injury made him realize he had to put in the work if he wanted to return to his sublime level of play. “I am hungry because I miss lots of games,” Malkin said. “Not just two or three games, 50 games. Of course I am hungry to play hockey and to miss all those games is a very hard time for me. But I had a great summer.”
And you simply cannot discount the absence of Crosby and Staal in all of this. Because despite the fact Malkin now faces the other team’s top line, targeted as the player who must be shut down, he is excelling. It’s no coincidence he was averaging 21:21 in ice time per game, which was almost two minutes more than last season. It’s also no coincidence Malkin is more productive when Crosby is out of the lineup and the numbers bear that out. Over the course of his career, Malkin has scored 185 goals and 477 points in 396 games for an average of 1.2 points per game. With Crosby in the lineup, he has posted 137 goals and 366 points for an average of 1.16 points per game. But in the 81 games without Crosby, Malkin has 48 goals and 111 points, for an average of 1.37 points per game.
That, of course, has something to do with the fact Malkin gets better wingers when Crosby (and Staal) aren’t in the lineup. Most of this season, he has been playing with Chris Kunitz on the left and Neal on the right. “This is the best line I’ve ever played with in my career,” Malkin said.
Both Shero and Malkin envision a day when Crosby, Malkin and Staal will be healthy and reunited. But will that day ever come? If it does, it doesn’t appear to be anytime soon. Crosby and the Penguins found themselves in the middle of a controversy during all-star weekend when it was revealed that doctors found an injury in his C1 and C2 vertebrae that Crosby’s agent later confirmed was a crack. Another doctor then said it was a soft tissue injury. All the while Crosby was skating, but nobody seems to know when he’ll return to the Penguins lineup. Staal, meanwhile, has been out of the lineup since early January with a sprained knee.
But they’re getting what they need from Malkin, who has only the Hart Trophy to win to complete his collection. This might be the year he gets it and the one in which he, and not Crosby or anyone else, leads the Penguins through the playoffs. “We need that or else it would be a tough go for us,” Shero said. “If we don’t have this guy…yikes.”
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