Why Evgeni Malkin is hockey’s most underrated superstar of all-time
I shake my head as Evgeni Malkin is honored for his 1,000th game, his Pittsburgh Penguins teammates taking part in his trademark stretching routine.
I shake my head at him racing out to 20 points through 19 games in his age-36 season, tracking to average a point per game or better for the 15th time in 17 seasons.
I’m not bitter, honest. That would be petty. I’m not a Penguins fan or a member of the Malkin family. I have no stake in the game. But every time Malkin adds to his enormous list of NHL accolades, I shake my head because I’m reminded of that ceremony. Yep. Los Angeles. All-Star Weekend 2017. The league celebrating its 100 greatest players ever and…somehow leaving ‘Geno’ off the list. It was an egregious oversight five-plus years ago and just looks sillier by the day.
Is Malkin…underrated? That doesn’t feel like the right way to distil the feeling. I’d be straw-manning it to simply call Malkin underrated when he owns a Hart Trophy, a Conn Smythe Trophy, two scoring titles, three Stanley Cup rings, a Calder Trophy and three first-team all-star selections.
But maybe it works to call him underrated as a superstar, underrated in terms of where he belongs among all the best forwards in NHL history. Playing his entire career under the shadow of what will likely be remembered as three of the 10 greatest players of all-time, Malkin has rarely been acknowledged as a borderline generational superstar in his own right. It’s like the late Dale Hawerchuk’s quietly amazing prime, sharing the NHL with Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, except, unlike Hawerchuk, Malkin did win everything there was to win.
How many players in NHL history have a Calder, Hart, two Art Rosses and a Conn Smythe Trophy: Three. The list: Bobby Orr, Mario Lemieux, Evgeni Malkin. Let it sink in again that this man was not named one of the NHL’s 100 greatest players and he had completed all those accomplishments by winter 2017.
How Malkin stacks up in the regular season since 2006-07, his rookie campaign:
| Stat | League rank |
| Games (1,000) | 49th |
| Goals (452) | 4th |
| Assists (714) | 5th |
| Points (1,166) | 4th |
| Points per game (1.17) | 3rd |
Among 505 players with 500 or more games played in the past 16 years, only Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby have averaged more points per game.
How about Malkin during the playoffs among players with at least 50 games since 2006-07?
| Stat | League rank |
| Games played (177) | 4th |
| Goals (67) | 3rd |
| Assists (113) | 2nd |
| Points (180) | 2nd |
| Points per game (1.02) | 9th |
We can count on one hand, or part of one hand, how many players have been more dominant than Malkin in the regular season and playoffs since he debuted. Yet he’ll still never be mentioned in the same breath as Alex Ovechkin, Crosby or McDavid when we remember the first quarter of the 21st century in hockey.
Why? Hart Trophy voting actually provides some circumstantial evidence. Malkin won it in 2011-12 and was the runner-up in 2007-08 and 2008-09, but he’s only received MVP votes in two of his past 10 completed seasons, finishing seventh in 2017-18 and 10th in 2019-20.
It’s not that Malkin hasn’t been a force for most of that stretch. It’s just that he’s too often out of sight, out of mind because he rarely plays anything close to a full season. Malkin’s games missed by year, with asterisks for those in which he won a major regular-season award and/or was named a first-team all-star:
| Season | Missed games |
| 2006-07 | 4* |
| 2007-08 | 0* |
| 2008-09 | 0* |
| 2009-10 | 15 |
| 2010-11 | 39 |
| 2011-12 | 0* |
| 2012-13 | 17 |
| 2013-14 | 22 |
| 2014-15 | 13 |
| 2015-16 | 25 |
| 2016-17 | 20 |
| 2017-18 | 4 |
| 2018-19 | 14 |
| 2019-20 | 14 |
| 2020-21 | 23 |
| 2021-22 | 41 |
That’s an incredible 251 games lost across Malkin’s first 16 seasons. Many players would kill for a 251-game NHL career. Malkin missed more than 20 percent of Pittsburgh’s games in his first 16 seasons.
Almost every time he’s managed close to a full season, he’s been honored as one of the league’s elite players. And when his seasons have been cut short, he’s still typically been a juggernaut. Take 2019-20, in which he played 55 of the Pens’ 69 games. Malkin was overlooked in any awards talk and yet, in 5-on-5 play, he led the NHL in points per 60 minutes.
That’s Malkin for you: one of the most consistently dominant players ever, yet overlooked to the point he wasn’t even named a top 100 player by the NHL.
According to Adjusted Hockey founder Paul Pidutti’s Hall of Fame resume cards, Malkin is the 15th most Hall-worthy forward of all-time. That sounds a lot more accurate to me.
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