The Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman had some thoughts about Nikita Kucherov's performance at the All-Star skills competition.
The Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman had some thoughts about Nikita Kucherov's performance at the All-Star skills competition.
The Tampa Bay Lightning play their first game for the month of February tonight - on the road against the New York Rangers. The Lightning are third in the Atlantic division behind the Florida Panthers and the Boston Bruins. This will be the second time they have played the Rangers - the first meeting resulting in a 5-1 loss at the end of December.
Right before the All-Star break, Nikita Kucherov was on fire. He had 10 points in five games - four of which were goals.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14R9_zoGY08[/embed]
The Russian forward is on pace for a career year. He's scoring at a 1.73 points per game pace, which has him projected to accumulate 142 points. He's tied with Nathan MacKinnon for the most points in the NHL with 85. His best year (point production-wise) was back in 2018-19 when he scored 41 goals and had 128 points.
It's no wonder that in the middle of this kind of year, Kucherov gets invited to the All-Star game. While there he struggled with the skills competition, below is a clip from his run in the passing challenge.
One of the announcers in the clip can be heard saying, "I'm not sensing a lot of intensity here." That sentiment was echoed with a lot of users on X (Twitter) who responded to the above post (you can click on the above tweet to read some of those comments).
One person who did not feel the same way was his teammate Mikhail Sergachev. He was asked about Kucherov's performance the other day at practice and he told reporters who were there that he feels like his teammate is misunderstood.
"Some people just don't understand what happened. When you are going in that skills competition and you lose the puck in the first three seconds, you have no chance."
Sergachev didn't see a reason for Kucherov to push to win the event considering who Kucherov was up against, "those drills are for [Connor] McDavid. Cause he's doing them in the summer, Kuch [is] never doing them in the summer."
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K-OMc8ifYc[/embed]
He didn't see a lack of urgency in Kucherov's performance. He simply saw Kucherov playing at the same pace he brings to every regular season hockey game, "he did it his speed. Most of the time he plays that speed too."
"I'm not mad, it was actually really entertaining."
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