EuroVision: Watch ‘the best fight of the year!’

EuroVision: Highlights, notes, tweets and photos from across the pond – where the lockout doesn’t quite translate

Watch as Trevor Gillies stands toe-to-toe with Jon “Nasty” Mirasty early in a KHL match between Barys Astana and Vityaz Chekhov on Monday. Both Canadian heavyweights were dealt five-minute majors, officially for “roughing.”

“The best fight of the year!” claims Sovietsky Sport’s Pavel Lysenkov, who tweeted out this clip of the combat.

Fight winner Gillies, who played 56 games for the New York Islanders and one for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks between 2005 and 2012, racked up a whopping 261 penalty minutes during his NHL career and has continued to drop gloves and opponents in Russia.

Though his team would go on to lose 3-2 in a shootout, a loss that snapped Barys’ winning streak at three, Gillies cherished his knockdown moment:

Dinamo Minsk’s Evander Kane, the sole locked-out NHLer from Canada to join the KHL, continues to flounder in Russia.

Kane hasn’t registered a point in six games, and on Monday the Winnipeg Jets forward was dealt a major and ejected in the second period for “checking to the head and neck area.” A minus-4, Kane has tallied 41 PIMs just a half dozen games in the KHL:

Nicklas Backstrom assisted on linemate Alex Ovechkin’s goal during his KHL debut, a 3-0 shutout of Lokomotiv, but made more noise for the number on his back than his mark on the scoresheet.

The best response to Backstrom wearing No. 99 for Dynamo Moscow, a KHL team that did not have a roster of 98 players before Backstrom signed:

Former NHLer Paiement, who wore No. 99 for 187 games with the Toronto Maple Leafs, is one of only three NHL players to wear the digit, the others being Rick Dudley and a centreman whose name eludes me.

If not a fan of Paiement’s, perhaps Backstrom – a Swede playing for a Russian team — is being ironic.

Paiement memorably attacked Swedish player Lars-Erik Ericsson (stick in the eye), as well as a trio of Russian players (all knocked unconscious), during Team Canada’s frustrating appearance at the 1977 Ice Hockey World Championships in Austria.

With 99 setting him up, Ovechkin scored a power-play marker and added an assist. He now has six goals and eight assists in 13 games.

Complete highlights of Backstrom’s debut:

Another two-point night for SKA’s Ilya Kovlachuk, whose shorthanded goal helps extend his club’s victory streak to seven. Dude now has a silly 20 points in just 11 games played. No wonder he told Sportbox.ru, “If the conditions in the NHL will be unclear, many guys will think twice whether to return there or not.”

Evgeni Malkin posted four points versus Dynamo Riga, bringing his total to 17 in 13 games played:

And another NHLer has been injured abroad:

The player’s agent, Jay Grossman, later clarified to Gulitti that Volchenkov broke “a small bone” near the arch of his foot and not the actual ankle.

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