We’re still five games into the 2024-25 NHL season, and Pittsburgh Penguins forward Evgeni Malkin has already achieved some major career milestones.
The most recent came Wednesday night when he joined the 500-goal club with a power play in the third period of his team’s 6-5 overtime victory over the Buffalo Sabres. . In addition to that goal, he finished the night with four total points (one goal, three assists), making him the sole NHL scorer.
His 11 total points are three more than Colorado Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar and any other player in the entire league throughout Wednesday’s game.
This is a very promising start for a player who entered the season with perhaps the lowest expectations of his career.
But in reality, there’s more to it than just what you can expect.
It was also statistically the best start to a season he’s had in the NHL. At least from an offensive scoring standpoint through the first five games.
Until the start of the 2024-25 season, Malkin had never opened a season with more than nine points in the first five games of the season (which happened twice), and had scored eight or more points in the first game four times. Only 5 games.
He has already significantly exceeded that number this season.
Perhaps even more encouraging than the actual points scored is the fact that he simply looks better. During the 2023-24 season, Malkin looked slower than the rest of the Penguins’ core group and wasn’t consistently playing close to the level we’re used to seeing.
Through the first five games of this season, he’s looked like a completely different player, seemingly finding the fountain of youth early in his age-38 season.
This was not only Malkin’s best start to a season in his career, but also one of the best starts ever for a player in his age group.
There are only eight other times in league history where a player over the age of 35 has scored at least 10 points in the first five games of a season.
Sidney Crosby has one of those, too.
Mario Lemieux has two of them.
Alex Ovechkin, Joe Pavelski, Maurice Richard, Martin St. Louis and Mats Zuccarello all have them as well.
That’s it.
Is it Malkin’s determination to prove he still has something left in the tank, or the fact that Rickard Rakell is playing better on the wing, or a combination of the two? Or is it something else entirely?The bottom line is that he is: A great version by Evgeni Malkin.
That could be a huge game-changer for the Penguins’ chances this season.
This season, the Penguins needed more balanced scoring from the bottom of the lineup, but it wasn’t just the bottom six that needed to generate more points. The second line needed to be better than it was a year ago.
Malkin’s 2023-24 season was one of the worst of his career from a game-by-game productivity standpoint, and the lack of consistency on his line, and on the power play, contributed to the Penguins’ struggles. It was a big part of it. Part of it was on him. Part of it was about the condition of his linemates.
It’s still early, but through five games both he and Raquel look like completely different players than they were a year ago.
The Penguins need to get more from Michael Bunting than they’ve gotten so far on that line, but the play of Malkin and Rakell is very encouraging.
No one expects the 38-year-old Malkin to continue averaging 2 points per game over the next 77 games, but if they can continue to get anything close to this level of play from Malkin and Racquel, it’s a solution. It will be of great help towards. This team has a lot of problems offensively.
(Data for this post via Hockey Reference)
