Had a chance to catch up with Dave King last night for the first time in months. It was at the launch party in Calgary for the book we collaborated on about his year of coaching in Russia, a crazy and wildly successful season in which the team won so many games in the regular season that they ran out of bonus money to pay the players and as a result, dipped into their travel funds to stay within the budget (dooming them to commercial instead of charter flights for the final quarter of the regular season).
Called King Of Russia and published by McClelland & Stewart, it chronicles the 2005-06 season of the Super League team, Metallurg Magnitogorsk, which coincided with Evgeni Malkin’s final year in Russia. Malkin had a fabulously successful NHL rookie season last year playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins; one of the only issues was that he didn’t do much in their opening-round playoff loss to the Ottawa Senators. King suggested yesterday that failing was completely out of step with the Malkin he coached, a player who always elevated his play in the final moments of a close game.
Russian hockey, according to King, is so defensively oriented these days (and features the obstruction that the NHL is thankfully weaning out of the game), that all the games – even against the Super League’s also-rans – tended to be nail biters. “We won so many games in the last two minutes and it was usually because of Malkin,” said King, who noted that of all the 19-year-olds he’d ever coached (including two ultra-precocious kids, Eric Lindros and Rick Nash), Malkin might have been the best of the lot.
King was the first Canadian to coach in the Russian Super League, but it is an uncertain gig. The second, Mike Krushelnyski, did not return to Vityaz this season; and the third, Paul Gardner, was fired after seven games by Yaroslav Locomotiv. That leaves only one Canadian left coaching in Russia at the moment, Barry Smith, the former Phoenix Coyotes’ assistant, who is at the helm in St. Petersburg. King, incidentally, is currently not working anywhere and makes his winter home in Phoenix, where the young and rebuilding Coyotes could probably use a teaching voice on their coaching staff.
