Gusev goal helps SKA sink Sochi. November 2 round-up
Nikita Gusev’s return to SKA brought a victory over Sochi – but the 5-2 verdict was tougher than expected against the KHL’s basement team. Dinamo Minsk scored a short-handed goal in the final second to win at Kunlun Red Star in Wednesday’s other game.
Dinamo leaves it late
Kunlun Red Star 2 Dinamo Minsk 3 (2-2, 0-0, 0-1)
A dramatic shorthanded goal in the final second saw Dinamo complete a fightback from 0-2 to beat KRS. Despite dominating the play for much of the game, Craig Woodcroft’s team had a tough time breaking down some resolute Kunlun defense.
In the final minute, when Joseph Duszak took a cross-checking call, the visitor was in danger of losing the game. Instead, though, Igor Martynov picked the perfect moment to grab a shorthanded goal, intercepting the puck on his own blue line before sprinting down the ice to beat Jeremy Smith and win the game for Minsk.
That seemed a long way off after Red Star’s fast start gave it a two-goal lead after 10 minutes’ play. Both came on the power play. First, Zac Leslie exchanged passes with Brandon Yip before shooting home from the right-hand dot. Then Leslie’s point shoot was tipped past Alexei Kolosov by Parker Foo to double the lead.
Despite that 2-0 advantage, Red Star was not controlling the play. The stats from the opening minutes suggested that Dinamo had more of an attacking presence, as long as it could stay out of the box. And the next 10 minutes confirmed this. Duszak pulled one back, then Vadim Moroz potted his first KHL goal after a Cedric Paquette shot cannoned back off the boards.
Red Star’s early attacking presence all but evaporated in the second period, with the home team managing just three shots at Kolosov. At the other end, Smith was rather busier, keeping his colleagues in the game with 15 stops.
Smith was beaten at the start of the third period, but the KRS video coach was on his game and called for a bench challenge. The review determined that the goalie was unfairly impeded, and the goal was whistled down. However, there was little change in the pattern of play and Martynov’s last-gasp goal gave Dinamo a deserved win.
Scoring return for Gusev
SKA St. Petersburg 5 HC Sochi 2 (1-1, 0-1, 4-0)
The big news ahead of this game was Nikita Gusev’s return to SKA. The 30-year-old forward spent the summer looking for opportunities across the Atlantic, but decided to come back to Petersburg instead. Gusev, who won a Gagarin Cup under Oleg Znarok here in 2017 and played a big role in securing Russian Olympic gold with the same coach a year later, has played more than five seasons for the club.
Today, he was restored to the first line alongside Dmitrij Jaskin and Mikhail Vorobyov. If the club was familiar, the strike partners were rather less. Jaskin and Gusev had never previously played together, while Vorobyov only joined him in the latter part of last season. The old new boy did not disappoint, collecting a goal and an assist in his first game of the campaign.
The visit of rock-bottom Sochi to table-topping SKA looked, on paper, to be a mismatch. The home team’s lead over second-placed CKSA is 10 points; Sochi has managed just nine in the league all season. However, with nothing to lose, the visitor proved more testing than expected. In the fifth minute, Sochi got in front. An odd-man rush saw Nikita Popugayev swing the puck from right to left, where Nikita Feoktistov shot past Alexander Samonov. SKA went on to dominate the play, outshooting Sochi 12-6 and enjoying three times as much offensive possession. However, it took until the 18th minute for the home team to tie it up. Andrei Pedan’s tally came with a huge slice of good fortune: his hopeful feed towards the back door was going nowhere until it bounced off a defenseman’s skate and into the net.
That was not the start of SKA’s path to victory, though. In the second period, Sochi responded with a lively attacking performance, outshooting its host 16-9. Both teams hit the piping, with Gusev dinging the crossbar as he looked to mark his return with a goal. There was a disallowed effort in the 38th minute when Pedan thought he had scored again, but after calling for a video review he was told that the puck did not cross the line.
There was no doubt about Andrei Altybarmakyan’s tally in the last minute of the session, though. Brandon Gormley chipped the puck into center ice, SKA’s players waited for someone to react and Altybarmakyan beat them to the punch, nipping in to steal possession and beat Samonov. That was a sweet moment for a player who began his KHL career at SKA, but left after just 14 appearances.
SKA responded with a power play goal at the start of the third, and Gusev collected his first point of the season. The forward found a cross-ice feed that set up Stepan Falkovsky in the right-hand circle and the Belarusian defenseman made no mistake.
In the final 10 minutes, the home team ended Sochi’s resistance and delivered the expected victory. Marat Khusnutdinov got the go-ahead goal, then came the moment most had been waiting for. Gusev marked his return with a goal, albeit courtesy of another deflection from a Sochi player. This time, Yury Alexandrov was the luckless defenseman, steering Nikita’s intended feed for Jaskin into the roof of the net. Former Sochi man Vasily Glotov completed the scoring with a power play goal as SKA continues to lead from the front.
