Sunday, March 19, 2006

Sergey Who?

This Blogging can be an interesting thing. I have some code within the pages that tells me on a free service from a guy in Ireland what pages are being read from where for how long and other stuff like that.

Once Tom Benjamin linked me on his Canucks Corner my traffic took off. Well by take off I mean it jumped from a couple of views a day to tens of views a day. Thanks again Tom! By and far the most popular page has been the video of Ruutu’s hit on Jagr in the Turin Olympics – it is here

One interesting thing. I can see the Google search strings people are using to reach my pages. I noticed recently that for some reason I am getting hits on Sergey Mylnikov. To this my initial reaction was “huh – who is Sergey Mylinkov?” It turns out Sergey was a Russian goaltender during the 1987 Canada Cup Series. I wrote about that series as part of the coverage of Mario Lemieux’s retirement – here I had unintentionally included Sergey’s name in the piece.

By further investigation I found this interesting site - click here. It contains a list of many of the Soviet and Russian players with some connection to the NHL. For example, did you know the first Russians to win the Stanley Cup were Sergey Nemchinov, Surgey Zubov, Alexander Karpovtsev and Alexey Kovalev who were all part of the 1994 New York Rangers. The Rangers beat Pavel Bure and Evgeny Namestnikov of the Vancouver Canucks in seven games. Evgeny only played one playoff game that spring and I do not know if it was in the Ranger’s series. Regardless his name would have been added to the cup had the Nuck's won.

Sergey Fedorov and Igor Larionov have the most cup wins by Russians. Both have won three times as team mates on the 1997, 1998 and 2002 Detroit Red Wings. Given Larionov and Bure’s history with the Canucks wouldn’t that have made an interesting trivial question. Who won a Stanley Cup first? Larionov or Bure?

So did Sergey Mylnikov ever make it to the NHL? Yes he did. He was drafted 127th overall by the Quebec Nordiques in 1989. As a rookie he played ten games (568 minutes) winning 1, losing 7 with 2 ending in ties. He gave up 47 goals one an empty netter. His GGA was 4.96 and Pct was 0.858. Sergey played for Russia in the World Cup that spring. He played four more seasons, two in Russia and two in Sweden. He appears to have retired after the 1994/95 season.

Ciao,


Tags: ; ;

No comments:

Post a Comment