Welcome to the Hotstove! As always, I'm your host, Travis Yost.
On Saturday, thirteen games kicked off the 2013 NHL regular season schedule. Some teams -- the St. Louis Blues and Anaheim Ducks in particular -- looked sensational. Other teams? Not so much.
There were some fantastic individual performances, too. Forty year-old Jaromir Jagr had a four-point night against the Phoenix Coyotes. Not to be out-done, the forty-two year-old Teemu Selanne scored four of his own against the Vancouver Canucks. Eight(!) other scorers, including Radim Vrbata, Marian Hossa, Martin St. Louis, Jon Huberdeau, T.J. Oshie, Alex Kovalev, Teddy Purcell, and Erik Karlsson had three-point nights.
With a lot of goal-scoring, the goaltending in particular didn't have a great night, although Jose Theodore managed to stop forty-one of forty-two shots, and Craig Anderson twenty-seven of twenty-eight.
All in all, plenty of memorable opening night games. The question -- what single individual performance was the most impressive to you, and why?
My answer: All due respect to the show put on by a couple of the aforementioned season veterans, I was pretty blown away by the regular season debut of St. Louis Blues rookie Vladimir Tarasenko. The Russian import's all-world skill-set has been a known quantity since being selected sixteenth overall in the 2010 NHL Draft, and after a couple of years developing further in the KHL, he appears quite ready to make the full-time jump to North American hockey.
Tarasenko had two markers on the evening, including this turnstiling of the Detroit blue line.
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