Former Red Wings center and current SKA St. Petersburg coach Igor Larionov is hosting a podcast on Vedmosti.ru, as first reported by Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff on August 1st.
This morning, Duff shares a readout of a conversation Larionov had with fellow Wings alumnus Pavel Datsyuk from Sport-Express, and Datsyuk told Larionov that even #13 was a bit star-struck when he joined the 2001-2002 Red Wings team:
“The whole time it seemed like I didn’t close my mouth,” Datsyuk explained. “I ended up on some crazy planet, where another world opened up to me, a hockey world. I could attend a training session, where each training session was like a lesson for me. One day I could watch one player, another day another. It was such a wonderful time.”
Detroit’s roster that season included nine future Hall of Fame players – Larionov, Dominik Hasek, Nicklas Lidstrom, Brett Hull, Luc Robitaille, Steve Yzerman, Sergei Fedorov, and Chris Chelios. And of course, Datsyuk, who would go on to a spectacular career of his own.
“You joined the team and still became an outstanding personality,” Larionov said to Datsyuk. “This is something to strive for, understanding that this is a lot of work that you have to go through. And you did it. And I am glad that I was able to play with you on the same team for a couple of years.”
Continued; the actual readout is interesting. Kudos to Duff for finding it and sharing it with us.
That 2002 team was truly a team for the ages. Stories like this makes me wish Bob or Kevin Allen had written an in depth book about them. I know Nick Cotsonika wrote one, but it was basically cliff notes from his newspaper columns, not even close to the Russian 5 book by Keith Gave.