He flapped his wings. He tapped his heart. And most importantly, he doesn’t have to call his parents to explain bad news.
Evgeny Kuznetsov is all in on this World Cup and, surely, so is anyone else who watched Team Russia reinvigorate its tournament hopes with a harrowing 4-3 win over Team North America Monday night at Air Canada Centre.
The victory evened Russia’s record to 1-1 and kept its semi-final hopes alive. A loss, by contrast, would have already relegated this event to the pile of recent best-on-best Russian disappointments, and led to more than a few tough conversations.
“Even it’s hard to call my parents, my family, because they want to win,” Kuznetsov said.
The rest of us just want more action like that.
Seriously, this was 60 minutes that—whether you had a horse in the race or not—made you feel something. The hockey was frantic, flawed and positively spellbinding. It was also a huge endorsement for the future of the game because not one of the seven goals was netted by a player who’s experienced a 25th birthday. North America, as you know, is an 23-and-under squad, while at 24 years and nine months, Vladimir Tarasenko was the oldest of four Russians to find the net.
Tarasenko’s goal capped an outburst that saw Russia erase a 1-0 deficit with four consecutive tallies in just six minutes and 14 seconds beginning right before the halfway point of the game.
The third of those goals came after Kuznetsov burned down the ice, cut toward the crease and slipped the puck through North American goalie Matt Murray.
His momentum carried Kuznetsov behind the net and around to the opposite boards, where he broke out his imaginary wings in celebration. After the game, Kuznetsov made another gesture, giving the left side of his chest a couple light taps to demonstrate exactly what part of his body would have been destroyed by a defeat.
“If we would have lost today, we would have left with hurt in the heart,” he said. “That’s tough. But we didn’t. We win the game and we feel like a family.”
The most valued member of the brood right now might be goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, who faced 46 shots, including 19 in a third period where North America did all it could to square the affair. The young bucks came in waves at times, but ‘Bob’ never buckled.
“He was a wall there for us today and won us the game,” said Vladislav Namestnikov.
If the goalie was a rock, Namestnikov—who did not dress for Russia’s 2-1 loss to Sweden on Sunday—provided a spark by scoring his team’s first goal. It was Russia’s first five-on-five tally through four-plus periods of the tournament and seemed to awaken a slumbering attack.
Fifty seconds later, Namestnikov’s Tampa Bay Lightning teammate Nikita Kucherov found the range to give Russia the lead. By the time Tarasenko and Kuznetsov struck, North American heads were spinning atop stationary bodies.
“They were quicker, they were stronger,” North America coach Todd McLellan said in regard to that defining portion of the game. “They stripped us a number of times. We looked slow, and that’s not the way we play.”
The Russians had their own concerns about some aspects of their showing, a given on a night when they surrendered nearly 50 shots. But the draw of this game was its raw energy and endless action, not the fact it belongs in a textbook about airtight hockey.
We may never see a highly-structured game from the Russians in this tournament, but we are going to see them in more high-stakes action. And nobody seems happier about that than Kuznetsov.
