Look at this kid!

Bruce Bennett Studios/Getty Images

He was only 20 when his CCCP team destroyed team Canada with young Wayne Gretzky and other stars such as Guy Lafleur, Mike Bossy, Bryan Trottier and Gilbert Perreault. In the last game of the series the final score was 8-1!



Here Larionov (#11) plays on KLM line and scores at 0:20 of this video (he scored two goals in this game and the final score was 8:1).


By Pierre LeBrun, Nov. 10, 2008, "Larionov's Hall induction honors a truly remarkable journey":

Larionov arrived in Hockeytown early in the 1995-96 season.

"He was a special kind of player," Bowman said. "The part about him, really, is how good he was defensively. I hardly ever had a player as good as him in the last five minutes of a game when you were protecting a lead. His positional play was so good.

"It's like having a playing coach on the ice. I thought because he was battle-scarred from all the big tournaments he played in. He was calm. He just made all the right moves all the time."

For Fedorov, it was a reunion with a player he tremendously admired. As a timid teenager on the Soviet national team in the late 1980s, Fedorov didn't really get to know the legendary Larionov. But he watched and learned.

"When I joined Red Army team, he was one of the most gifted and talented centers in the game, if not the best," Fedorov said. "His stickhandling, the way he saw the ice, for me as a center, that was key to see and work on."

Nearly a decade later, they were teammates in the NHL. It was a dream come true.

"At that point, I felt he didn't mind if I talked to him," Fedorov said. "We were more like friends in Detroit, not work colleagues. That was a fun time. Eventually, we would play on the same line and that was a thrill."

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