With Artemy Panarin sitting as the leading scorer coming off his breakout year, big captain Ilya Kovalchuk being the centre of attention, Vadim Shipachyov sitting as the third highest centre for points and constant goaltender controversies, and a dog fight for top of the league with CSKA Moscow, a little star seems under everything. And that is 26-year-old Evgeni Dadonov.
After scoring the game winning goal in overtime to knock out Dynamo Moscow, he got his moment to celebrate and be happy. Instead he was pushed over and had a quiet cheer on his knees before being swamped by Panarin. Wind back to the start of the game where, if you saw how Shipachyov reacted, you’d think he scored the overtime winner.
That sums up the quiet brilliance that has been Evgeni Dadonov. He’s quiet, would rather talk about the team than himself, and yet sits as a rather active player, sitting second in playoff goals. Yet he’s never thrown around as a key player, while in fact he is almost as important as the captain himself. Let’s roll back to that game five against Dynamo. Dadonov had 6 shots, almost a fifth of all SKA’s shots and only equaled by Dynamo’s Andrei Mironov, but more than the entire first line together. He is hungry to win and steaming ahead on the ice. “Clutch” might be a buzzword, but that’s certainly what he’s been throughout the playoffs.
This playoff run shouldn’t be such a surprise, Dadonov has been consistent all through the regular season. As I wrote quite a bit of time ago, Dadonov is what elevates Panarin’s line as the first above Kovalchuk’s line. He is the consistent winger that helped make space for Shipachyov and Panarin. He excels with great speed at finding the space, and passing the puck to Panarin while Shipachyov is in net. The sense for finding space and creating is why his promotion to the first powerplay unit helped make it one of the best in the league. He leads the team in powerplay goals with 10, two ahead of linemate Panarin and captain Kovalchuk, joint 4th in the League. For example, in the 2:3 win over Avengard Omsk, Dadonov netted a powerplay goal, managing to get into the central shooting lane, open with direct line to the net, enabling a pass through to snipe the goal. Many of his goals come from being the right place at the right time, or getting others to be. In that game his line scored all 3 of the goals and in every one Dadonov was a key part in the play. His sense of positioning and reading plays is what makes him so consistent, so important for that line to function.
One might argue that leading scorer Artemy Panarin or assist-leading Vadim Shipachyov is maybe the root cause of Dadonov’s success. However, we did have two instances where both players were injured, giving a little light to see how he actually fares away from the other two, the games to close the season off where Panarin was injured. We can see from this that Dadonov is not being carried by Panarin’s goals or Shipachyov’s assists. These are however, small four and five game stretches. In the case of Panarin being injured he was kept pointless in only two games, a 1-0 loss versus Atlant and a 3-1 win versus Dynamo Riga. Between that he had two 2-point games and scored the only goal on the powerplay during a 5-1 loss to Ak Bars Kazan and still stayed a point per game player over the stretch and starting to shoot more during this time, all this in spite of having his time on ice bumped up to almost 20 minutes over the usual 15. There was however, a slight hit when Shipachyov was out, with a rotating center between Jimmie Ericsson and Viktor Tikhonov, yet again he still managed to keep up a point per game over that stretch. Even with new centers, Dadonov is opening up room and plays for the rest of his linemates. None of this was wholly surprising even as an assistant captain with Donbass Donetsk, Dadnov was hitting 40 points in the 2012-2013 season.
Evgeni Dadonov might not be as explosive as Panarin, he might not celebrate as much or be an all-star player like Shipachyov. He might not have the big name like Ilya Kovalchuk, but Dadonov is a key piece, a very key piece to that line functioning. All three of the players, Panarin, Shipachyov and Dadonov did not stay in the top ten for assists and goals for almost half of the season for no reason. Dadonov was the unsung star for SKA, constant, strong, and his overtime winner was finally his moment in the spotlight. And what did he do? Not even a smile, just a credit to his teammates.
Credit the rest of the team.
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