In this bar tipsily googling friendship necklaces I think Kuzy should buy definitely already owns and kisses gently every night
@blushingsweet please vote on which one, this is very important
@urlocalhotmess
oh you utter darling
you miniature pumpkin of a Caps fan
you don’t know who that gif is! Right? That has to be what happened here. I’m not making fun, I’m so delighted that you didn’t get my incredibly specific joke but you asked anyway and you are gonna regret asking me so very, very soon
*
Evgeny Kuznetsov is a fairytale.He is a sonnet to friendship. He has been devoted to one (1) person since he was about five years old and one day he’s gonna win Olympic gold for Russia and cut his medal in half to share it with his hockey muse.
He grew up in the city of Chelyabinsk, just a couple minutes or “30 seconds if I run” away from the Traktor Chelyabinsk rink. His parents picked that apartment because they realized their toddler would run right into Russian traffic if he thought he saw a hockey game on the other side, so they up and moved to his preferred side of the street.
(They gave up trying to just tell him not to do that and that should have told us a lot about Kuznetsov.)
So every day, as soon as school let out, little Zhenya would race over to the Ice Palace to watch Traktor practice. Specifically, one boy, the boy Kuzy knew immediately he needed to be friends with forever and ever: Capitals prospect and Russia’s teenage dream, Alexander Semin.
I’ve heard somenonsense, so we all just need to accept that Sasha’s symmetrical face, mysteriously Barbie pink pout, and fluffy, fluffy half-mullet made him Russia’s One Direction. A year ahead of Ovechkin, and 8 years older than Kuzy, he was the first promising new star after the fall of the Soviet hockey program, and also a babe.
He also adores kids (the original gif I used is him delivering sports equipment to an orphanage in his home town. He’s devoted the majority of his career to children’s charities) and he is irretrievably obsessed with hockey.
Thing is, Chelyabinsk in the late ‘90s was not a hotbed of hockey, not compared to the elite schools in Moscow. Soviet hockey players had all trained in ‘the Russian Machine’—before Ovi adopted it, that referred to an intense program of hours of daily skating exercises starting at an early age. Sasha originally trained as a figure skater, and was determined to put himself through a home-made Machine to make the KHL and support his family.
After team practice, games, and a couple rounds of pick-up hockey each day, he would go back to the rink and practice his skating at night.
So Kuzy started sneaking in to skate, too.
You’ll hear Kuznetsov praised as a figure skater: unlike Jeff Skinner and Semin himself, he never actually studied figure skating. He just studied Sasha. Their moves are still so similar that in his draft reports analysts described Kuznetsov as a second Semin, without the faintest idea the two of them had met. Kuzy’s favorite move, racing into a turn behind the net for his twister pass, clearly draws inspiration from Sasha’s footwork (as does the celly he wraps it up with).
But more than that, Kuzy’s joyful creativity owes a lot to having a hero who’s also his best friend and his biggest fan. Semin treated this weird, weird kid who followed him home one day as a peer while still protecting him, watching him until his mother could come to pick her wandering child up.
When the rink staff tried to kick them out, Kuzy came up with the following cunning plan:
earn pocket money by washing cars (he hasn’t said so but I’m pretty sure he made Sasha do that bit)
use the money to buy candy
bribe the security guard with snacks to let them stay after hours
It’s raw 8 year-old brilliance, but instead of telling him that sounded dumb and to just go home already, Sasha did it. Pretty sure he must have gone to the guard himself and asked the guy to play along, because he didn’t want to Kuzy to feel discouraged from thinking creatively.
And then he had to leave.
Listen.
Sasha is a complicated figure in the NHL. The way we talk about him now is pretty inextricably threaded through with value judgments about cultural assimilation, about social class and ethnic identity, about ability and neurodiversity and trauma. We’re happier than I wish we were to call him lazy, ‘stupid and dumb,’ to describe ways he acts which to me feel intensely familiar as if no one can or should understand them.
But it strikes me that he never had a teammate who didn’t look happier when he was there. Seeing a temperamental perfectionist rookie eating himself up with stress, he always volunteered to draw him out, make him laugh.
This year, we see Kuzy sitting by Vrána on the bench.
When someone says that, you always wonder who was that person for them.
In 2012, Kuzy propelled the national team through the World Cup undefeated; Sasha was able to join him for the semi-final and final game, playing together on the same team for the first time.
This photo, which I will continue to reblog until one of you pries it from my icy grasp, is from that first game. There’s a lot to say about it but we’ll stick to how nobody else is excited because they hadn’t won the championship yet, they just wanted to hold each other.
After that, Kuzy stayed in the KHL on the explicit promise of a place on the roster for Sochi. It would have been a once-in-a-lifetime honor for a Russian athlete, and it was Kuznetsov’s dream to play alongside Sasha and Ovi, who he’d both grown up watching at past Olympics. Sasha made the team but Kuzy was sidelined by an injury. The next year Kuzy came to North America, and Sasha returned to the KHL.
They’ve still played together just once in their adult lives. But they’ve stayed in touch, meeting up several times during the year they overlapped in the NH and attending Ovi’s wedding together last year.
And when he’s given the opportunity to talk about his time with the Capitals, all Sasha wants to do is turn attention to Kuzy. Asked what he thought meeting Kuznetsov for the first time when he was so young, he said,
“I never doubted he would be one of the best players in the world.”
@blushingsweet has weighed in the Kuznetsov wears and treasures the “Weirdo #1″ necklace but I am open to hearing more opinions on this important issue
*this is all public information, but most of it hasn’t been published in English. Almost everything comes from my translations of a truly obscene number of Russian scouting reports and gossip mags, so my policy is to ask that you cite me or ask appropriate permission before reposting my translations without my name.
so I did recognize him as Semin, thanks entirely to you, but I didn’t realize that they were friends or know any of that backstory so I do not regret asking in the least
oh absolutely to be fair to you, as many people pointed out, thinking that I just stuck a gif of Sasha Semin’s face on something not generally considered to have fuck-all to do with Sasha Semin was a safe bet
a short while a long time ago
I am sorry, I will pause the Russian Hockey History Chanel if you want, but…why are you doing this to my heart? Why have we Caps fans failed ourselves like this?
When we let him go in 2012 Semin was coming close to oh, about 10 years with the Caps, playing with the main team for 7 seasons.
The original Young Gun, he and that cute shark-eyed boy with the A there and Sasha’s grumpy little Swedish rookie who you might know were supposed to and did define each other’s careers, a self-contained hurricane of assists and goals.
You know how Nicky and Ovi say their marriage makes them “hard to play with”? Gosh, it’s odd how that wasn’t an issue in their early career. How after we traded Ovi’s mirror wing suddenly there’s no one who plays the way Ovi likes, because nobody else has been feeding him passes since he was 16.
Ovi is Ovi and had to adapt; TJ looked like he might come close and Tom has been able to take a different route to a similar result–but there’s still no one who’s touched the role Sasha played and how he and Ovi defined each other.
And he’s still painted across all our franchise leaderboards. Next time Ovi or Nicky hits a milestone, take a peek at the other names they’re passing:
You’ve likely seen this one because Nicky only just passed him this season.
So that (and quite a few others I’m leaving off to not just totally overwhelm you) is interesting to remember given that…Nicky and Ovi have had much longer to get to where they are.
It’s not like we mysteriously lost him like a sock at the back of the dryer, you guys. It’s not like hockey killed him.
When Nicky recently passed him Joe B still audibly hesitated to say his name on air, knowing that fans would react badly, alluding to him as “Ovi’s main man–you know,” instead. There are names that aren’t on any of these lists that we’ll mention before him and it’s not that I don’t love celebrating them, but I think we really ought to question why we still act so weird about Sasha.
Oh I still need to be clear:
Ovi, who took this picture with Semin, frequently made Sasha sit on his lap, asked to room together for years, made sure Sasha came to his wedding, and still texts him over a 14 hour time difference….
…has still not known Sasha as long as Kuzy. HE HAS BEST FRIEND DIBS.
my takeaway: Kuzy should 100% do the drunk history episode on Alexander Semin.
pretty sure what you’re asking for would be:
Part 1: Evgeny Kuznetsov, clutching a half-empty wine cooler, tries to slap everybody who says the word “history.”
When Semin retired from the KHL temporarily, Kuzy told reporters he was “sure” Sasha would be back in the NHL “soon”. His love is unlimited by space, time, or international contract law. God knows what he believes know Sasha’s in the KHL again. The video ends with him knocking the camera over.
Part 2: We return to Evgeny Kuznetsov, on to his second wine cooler now, reading his Powerpoint presentation on why it’s fiscallyirresponsible for any NHL team not to take Sasha back.
There are 40 slides.
#1 is that Sasha will play for free, which honestly is a pretty good argument. Come on, Caps, the solution to your chronic cap-space issue is obvious.
The rest are mostly about Sasha’s haircut.
(oh man, and I didn’t even mention that Kuzy went on to do the same thing to Jaromir Jagr in this one)