Dragons stun SKA, halt four-game skid

29 September 2024

SKA St. Petersburg 4 Kunlun Red Star 5

Why do we love this game? Nights like this! You can study form all you like, you can talk about what should happen when two teams meet. You can accept that losing four in a row saps a team’s confidence, and travelling to a team that won its previous five is an absolute home banker. But you can’t legislate for guts, determination and ability when the guys are in a spot: on Sunday the Dragons delivered the performance of the season to stun SKA with a 5-4 win.

Despite disappointment against Dinamo Minsk in the previous game, Mikhail Kravets did not make wholesale changes. Instead, there was rotation: Tyler Wong and Martin Lefebvre came in, Jake Chelios and Kyle Wood sat out. SKA had greater issues after learning that star signing Evgeny Kuznetsov would miss the next couple of months through injury. That news might have somewhat muted the mood in the home camp but hardly explains what happened next.

Red Star looked lively from the start. Although, as is often the case against a team of SKA’s power, we conceded a lot of first-period possession, our forays over the blue line proved productive. Ryan Merkley had a good early chance before Rourke Chartier set off an odd-man rush that led to Parker Foo opening the scoring. Then, late in the first, Nail Yakupov scored on his former club, getting to the doorstep just in time to convert a Danny O’Regan feed from behind the net. O’Regan made a huge effort to chase down the home D and got his reward as we went up 2-0.

Of course, we can’t overlook the defensive effort in that first period. SKA is always a dangerous opponent and it took some big saves from Jeremy Smith to deny Ivan Demidov and Alexander Nikishin.

The second period saw Red Star on the power play and Rourke got his second assist of the night. His shot bounced off Artemy Pleshkov’s pads and presented Spencer Foo with the simplest of chances to finish into an open net. SKA pulled one back but there was more to come from the guys. Adam Clendening’s power play strike secured his first KHL goal midway through the game; note some great work from Brandon Yip to distract Nikita Serebryakov as the new SKA goalie had a rough introduction to the game.

A 4-1 lead felt comfortable and the second period stats showed how the contest was more even. A confident Kunlun came out for the third and Austin Wong thought he had the 5-1 goal until a bench challenge saw it ruled out for offside. However, SKA was running out of time and that forced head coach Roman Rotenberg to gamble. A power play with 10 minutes left saw him withdraw his goalie. Six-on-four hockey could not find a breakthrough and when Merkley jumped out of the box he got straight into the play and scored an empty-netter.

Leading 5-1 with less than 10 to play, it should have been a simple task to close out the win. However, the easy path isn’t really in the Dragons’ DNA. Zakhar Bardakov’s second of the game felt like mere consolation but SKA kept going. The home net was empty once again, but ours got uncomfortably full: Mikhail Grigorenko and Valentin Zykov scored in the closing stages to make it closer than we would have liked, but when the clock stopped a 5-4 lead was good enough for a memorable victory.