Good night: This old dude looks familiar
The Lead
Ah the tantalizing mystery of the Orient.
It’s been a long time since even hardcore hockey fans here in North America have seen Jaromir Jagr play. Two years ago, he took his ball and went home — well, “home” — to the KHL and has literally spent those seasons playing in freaking Siberia for Avangard Omsk.
How far away from his last NHL team, the New York Rangers, is Omsk? Well, to give you an idea of how remote it is, the nearest semi-major Russian city appears to be Kurgan (pop. 345,000 or roughly the size of Santa Ana, California), a 325-mile drive down M-51. Whatever that is.
So I figured it’d be interesting to see how this once-great superstar was playing in what must be the dying years of his career. If his skills had deteriorated in the intervening time since his last NHL season, in which he scored 71 points in 82 games, how bad was that erosion? By the look of things, it had to be considerable, right? I mean, he hasn’t yet scored at a point-a-game pace in a league that plays on that offense-increasing, 200-by-100, international-sized sheet of ice in a league that unironically considers Kevin Dallman to be its best defenseman. He had to be crap at this point, which would be understandable since his NHL debut came when Sid Crosby was three years old.
And through the first period, it looked like that was pretty much the case. He seemed to have trouble adapting to the smaller, NHL-regulation sheet of ice that he dominated for almost all of his 1,273-game NHL career (hell, he racked up 646 goals and 1,599 points in those games). He was getting hit by his Slovakian opponents every time he touched the puck and, as a consequence, looked every second of his 38 years. He was flustered by this physical play, which apparently doesn’t exist in the Kontinental Hockey League.
Despite his relative non-impact on the game, his Czech team still led 1-0 after 20 minutes thanks to a goal by an actual NHL player, Patrik Elias, but the Slovaks tied it just 47 seconds into the middle period.
And that’s when Jagr simply went off.
Suddenly this man whose competitive fire seemed reduced to gently-smoking embers was a roaring conflagration, consuming and destroying everything in his path like the voracious inferno of Hephaestus himself. His play was nothing short of revelatory, as he greedily snatched any puck that came within a stick’s length of him and exercised physical control over his opponents as though he were a despot and the boards his domain, ruled with an iron fist. What he saw he wanted, and what he wanted, he took. And everything in the game gravitated toward him shift after dynamic shift.
Having choked the life from the Slovaks for the first 17 minutes of the period, he finally seized control of the game once and for all. After Marian Hossa rocketed a shot off the post, Jagr picked up the pieces of the Slovak attack and chipped the puck to the neutral zone, followed it, created a turnover and was sprung for a semi-breakaway by a Roman Cervenka feed as he sprinted ahead of a diving Andrej Sekera. The rest was vintage Jagr.
His shot beat Jaroslav Halak just as it had so many early-90s goalies who had never heard of the butterfly, let alone been brought up in a hockey world dominated by it and that was the end of the actual game as far as anyone off the ice was concerned. After that, it was “The Jaromir Jagr Show (Featuring like 41 other guys).” The crowd lauded him, the announcers gushed over him, the camera followed him as he sat on the bench with a knowing half-smirk on his face. “I can still play,” he exuded, and the hockey world, on Twitter and message boards, in the arena and on television, had no recourse but to agree.
It almost didn’t matter that he corralled an errant shot from Marek Zidlicky 2:02 later and flipped the puck on net with the dextrous aplomb of youth and allowed Tomas Plekanec to swat the sitter into a wide open net. At that point, play like that had become typical, expected. This was the Jaromir Jagr we remembered, reborn on the international stage, taking one last victory lap in the sport’s most important competition.
None of this, of course, legitimizes the KHL or proves that Jagr is still ready for the physical rigors of a grueling 82-game NHL schedule. Nor does it mean the Czechs are going to finish any higher than fourth, and that’s if they’re lucky. But it was nice to have a reminder of what once was commonplace and therefore ordinary: one of the greatest athletes that any of us will ever see, playing the sport that earned him riches and renown nearly 20 years ago, and playing it better than just about anyone on the planet could have.
Elsewhere…
Finland 5, Belarus 1
A four-goal margin really makes this game look closer than it was. Miikka Kiprusoff had enough time to make and eat an entire turkey dinner for himself and at least one other defenseman while the other four Finns on the ice at any given time dominated the game. Final shots in the game: 45-12. At one point, Teemu Selanne had nine shots to the entire Belorussian team’s five. Only the play of Vitaly Koval, who made 40 saves behind a hopelessly overmatched defense, kept it even somewhat close.
Sweden 2, Germany 0
Another deceptive score. The Swedes scored twice in the second period but otherwise spent the entire game carrying play and holding possession with very little to show for it. Thomas Greiss made 23 saves on 25 shots but if you’re just going by possession, this game should have been a Canadian-sized blowout. Henrik Lundqvist got the shutout by staying just busy enough to not lose focus.
