500-goal scorer Evgeni Malkin is once again a superstar for the Penguins

Anthony Trudeau
Anthony Trudeau(atrud00)
500-goal scorer Evgeni Malkin is once again a superstar for the Penguins
Credit: Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

Pittsburgh Penguins center Evgeni Malkin already had a Hart Trophy, a Conn Smythe, a Calder and a pair of Art Rosses sitting in his cabinet before he took home a very special memento on Thursday night, the puck he used to tuck away his 500th goal. The effort, which saw him shovel a Sidney Crosby feed home from the seat of his pants, was uniquely Malkin, a feat of strength, creativity, and persistence.

His history-making tally may have sent the home crowd into hysterics and cleared the Pittsburgh bench, but it wasn’t his most important play of the night. Down 5-4 with 50 seconds left in the contest, Malkin uncorked a booming slapshot that wriggled through the legs of Buffalo goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukonen and onto extra attacker Rickard Rakell’s stick. 

Rakell made no mistake, and before long, Malkin, Erik Karlsson, and Crosby connected on a tic-tac-toe play in overtime to earn No.71 his fourth point and the Penguins the ‘W.’  

It was Malkin’s first game with three or more points since … Tuesday, when the veteran single-handedly dismantled the Montreal Canadiens (two assists and an empty net goal) on their country’s Thanksgiving.

Malkin now has four-straight multipoint games, and his nuclear hot streak has given him the league lead in scoring (11 P) and assists (9) through two weeks. 

The easiest explanation for why ‘Geno’ is still this good at 38 is that he’s one of the greatest players who’s ever tied a pair of skates, but it hasn’t always been that simple. The truth is that he’s had to rebuild his game to conquer an opponent more formidable than Henrik Lundqvist or even Nick Lidstrom: the aging curve.

Malkin last played at a superstar level in 2019-2020, when, spurred on by his electric connection with Bryan Rust (56 P in 55 GP), he busted out for 74 points in 55 games and earned his first Selke votes in more than a decade. Below the surface, though, cracks were already developing in the then 33-year-old’s armor. 

After nagging injuries kept him out of serious consideration for a second Hart Trophy (he finished 10th in voting after missing 15 games), Malkin’s health deteriorated further as knee issues limited him to 74 games over the next two seasons. 

When the big man finally returned to fitness to notch his fifteenth point-per-game effort in 2022-23, his struggles with decision-making and discipline (second in giveaways, sixth in minor penalties) were more prominent than ever. 

Without the transcendent physical dominance that made those lapses an acceptable tradeoff in his youth, it seemed Malkin would need to do most of his damage on the power play, where he collected 36 of his 83 points that season, to remain relevant into his late 30s.

That made Pittsburgh’s anemic 2023-24 man advantage, which found twine just 15.3% of the time despite featuring future Hall-of-Famers Crosby and Karlsson alongside team legends Kris Letang and Jake Guentzel, particularly tough on Geno. 

Malkin’s production sagged to 67 points, his fewest ever in a 60-game season let alone a full campaign, and the low-water mark seemingly served as grim confirmation that time had finally caught up with the Russian.

An old player on an old team that no one seems to believe in, Malkin wasn’t supposed to be this good in 2024-25, not after the least productive season of his illustrious career. 

Yet here he is, fooling goaltenders on the rush, using his frame to shield the puck, and setting up one-timers from behind the net like an Eastern European Joe Thornton. Malkin is partying like it’s 2009, and while that might be a surprise to neutral observers, it shouldn’t be to the Penguins fans who watched him last season.

Though Crosby’s herculean second-half effort (31 P in 21 GP after the trade deadline) kept Pittsburgh in the playoff hunt and stole all the headlines, Malkin, as ever, went to work in his captain’s shadow. 

His paltry scoring jumped off the stat sheet for all the wrong reasons, but a deeper dive into his numbers and game film reveals that, without a power play to fall back on, Malkin spent 2023-24 reinventing himself to maximize his effectiveness in the home stretch of his career. 

In the offensive zone, he relied less on perimeter shots (and the costly turnovers they can cause) and spent more time around the net, where his size and strength could compensate for his loss of speed. The result was 21 even-strength goals, the most for Malkin since the 2017-18 season (28) when he was the fourth-leading scorer in the NHL.

Away from the puck, Malkin worked to simplify his game on the orders of his coach, whose frustration with the star reached a boiling point after a January third-period collapse in Las Vegas. 

“I think he’s trying to do too much instead of just doing his job and allowing his teammates to do theirs,” Mike Sullivan said after the deflating defeat. “When he tries to do too much, that’s when we get caught in between.”

Malkin took the public callout to heart, cutting down on penalties (well, by his standards), recording his most takeaways since 2009, and nearly halving his giveaways (56). His famous coast-to-coast “gallops” were a thing of the past, but so were all those failed attempts at playing 1 vs 5 in transition.

Malkin had already remodeled his game by the time spring rolled around. All that was left was to find him wingers with enough physicality and finish to their game to complement his streamlined new style, easier said than done without longtime collaborators Rust, who moved up to Crosby’s line, and Jason Zucker, who left as a free agent the previous summer.

For most of the season, Malkin was stuck with Reilly Smith, who never showed any interest in being a Penguin on or off the ice, and the snakebitten Rakell (9 P before 1/1). It wasn’t exactly a Firing Line redux.

That all changed when Michael Bunting touched down in Western PA. The Carolina Hurricanes had sent the former Maple Leaf up north in the Guentzel trade to help fit their new star player under the salary cap, but it quickly became apparent he was no throw-in. 

Bunting was Malkin’s perfect foil, a younger, bigger Zucker equally adept at starting scrums and scoring goals. With the talented (if unlucky) Rakell on the right, the new-look second line instantly clicked to outscore opponents 14-8 at 5-on-5. Better still, they gave Sullivan a play-driving unit outside of Crosby’s. 

The Bunting-Malkin-Rakell line controlled over 61% of expected goals down the stretch in 2022-23, and that number has ballooned to over 68% through five games this season. Now that Rakell is back on the scoresheet (3 G and 5 GP), they’re more dangerous than ever.

With a 20-goal grinder in Bunting on one wing and two-time 60-point scorer in Rakell on the other, Malkin doesn’t have to take over games by sheer force of will anymore. He’s too old and too beat up for that to work these days anyway, and no one knows that better than the man himself.

“If you’re a good player, you learn to change your game over the years,” Malkin conceded before the season. “I want to learn to be more patient, use my wingers more, see what’s going on instead of trying to beat people all the time.”

Luckily for the Penguins, Evgeni Malkin is still a hockey genius even within the confines of a more conventional role. It’s taken him a long time to figure that out, but it’s a revelation that has reestablished Malkin as one of the very best players in the world in Year 19.

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