#tl;dr to me what makes him Special is his early days in the soviet union/his defection and his role in the russian five (and by extension

[3rdmeasurement]

Heeeyyyy, I'm so so intrigued by your hockey posting. I'd love to know more about Fedorov, like what's the lore, what makes him special? Have a nice day/ night <333

good morning/afternoon/evening anon! since you asked so nicely i'll try my best but i do tend to forget everything i know when i have to actually explain it. there is a lot of lore tho so i'm not gonna go over all of it (mainly the bits that interest me the most + some other stuff). i guess what really makes him special (at least to me) is the fact that we don't get players like this anymore. and i'm not talking playing style here (the impact of euro hockey players of the 90s on the nhl today is still so obviously there). a lot of his early career was directly impacted by cold war politics, and since those circumstances haven't existed for a while now, we don't get this insane type of backstories and lore anymore. i should also make it clear that i'm a massive nerd who sat in classrooms for years learning abt soviet stuff which i think definitely has an impact on who My Guys are

seriously there is a lot under the cut so be warned because i did get carried away with myself A Lot (i literally wrote over 1k words on this. sorry in advance)

ok so. sergei started playing "pro" hockey in the soviet union in the mid 80s (i don't think this is the place to explain whether these players were pro or amateur so will leave it like that), first in minsk (only for a year) before being picked up by cska moscow- the central army team. these guys made up most of the national team, which can probably be explained by the fact that their head coach also coached the national team (god that's a bit of a mouthful, but incredibly relevant). he wasn't the only rookie on the team that season; another kid (i think they were both like 16 at the time ?) called alex mogilny had also just arrived in moscow. they would become good friends. sergei would play three seasons for cska before being called up for the national team- he was going to the 1989 world championship. alex would be there, too, having already played on the team before. naturally, the ussr won gold (as they did almost every year). but that doesn't mean everything was good with the players. not long too after the tournament, some of the older players would finally get permission to play in the nhl, but for the younger guys it was looking like they had no way of getting out any time soon. in the days between the end of the championship and the soviet team's flight home, mogilny apparently approached fedorov and asked him to go to america with him- sergei said no, worried about what would happen to his family. alex would go anyway, disappearing for a few days before popping up in buffalo ready to join the sabres. (this might seem irrelevant right now but it's actually really not- i'm getting there now)

that same summer, sergei would be drafted in the fourth round by detroit. this choice may or may not have been influenced by steve yzerman telling them sergei was better than him. after a bit of back and forth, they got him to defect after cska played a series of games in north america. it literally sounds like the type of shit they write in spy films it was fucking mental. this made him only the second soviet to defect in order to play in the nhl i'm pretty sure (defo the second in like 18 months- funnily enough it was his bestie who was the first one. what a coincidence), but they weren't the first two from the other side of the iron curtain to do that. might be wrong but i think that honour goes to the stastny brothers. anyway. when sergei got to detroit he wore 91 because he wanted to "be like stevie" or some insane shit like that. which i literally think about all the time. like seriously what was that about sergei.

okok can't not talk about the russian five so doing that now. since idk how much you know about hockey i'll do a better job on this bit. after sergei arrived in detroit, management must've figured they could get more russians. over the next couple of years they got vladimir konstantinov (who was drafted the same year as sergei) and slava kozlov to make the jump to the states. since i'm mainly talking about sergei i won't go into how they got those two but it's just as unbelievable as you'd expect. after the 1994-95 lockout, the wings traded for another russian- slava fetisov. if you ever want to learn about soviet hockey you'll hear a lot about this guy, and for good reason too. he won two olympic gold medals and seven world championships with the soviet union, and captained most of those teams. obviously adding a guy with that much experience winning was a smart choice imo, even if he hadn't won anything in the nhl yet. by now the wings had four russian players- why not add a fifth ? in 1994 the wings were embarrassed in the playoffs, losing to san jose. it just happened that sj happened to have two of the older soviets who had fought for the right to play in north america. one of them was igor larionov- probably the smartest guy to ever play hockey. it was his tactics (and refusal to change his style of play) that led to his team's success in the first round. and i guess detroit didn't ever want to deal with that again because they ended up trading for the guy in the first part of the 1995-96 season. the russian five first played together in calgary, where they played that style of soviet hockey that nhlers could never really wrap their heads around at the time. they walked all over the flames in their own building, and would continue to do the same to the rest of the league. the five would be a key part of the 1997 stanley cup-winning team, which was the first wings team to lift the cup in over forty years.

sergei stayed to win a few more cups, and then left the city. he signed w the ducks in anaheim, bleached his hair and moved out to california (i think we can all resonate with wanting to change our appearance and move thousands of miles away from where we've spent over a decade building out lives amiright). from what i can tell, this move was Not Liked by detroit's owners (honestly i can't see any other reason his number hasn't been retired there). he'd bounce around a couple more nhl teams before going back to russia to play on the same team as his brother, eventually retiring in 2012.

jumping to 2015, that year's hockey hall of fame inductees included sergei (and nick lidstrom, one of his detroit teammates and one of the best defencemen to every play the game). it was basically a 90s wings reunion. in sergei's induction speech, he did like everyone else and thanked a bunch of people who helped him out throughout his career. and, you know, it was all the expected stuff (hockey guys can be so predictable sometimes), but "to my captain, steve yzerman" still fucking gets me. it had been twelve years since he'd worn a wings jersey. my captain. i think you get my point but i'm gonna have to stop there because i can't carry on and be remotely normal about it.

oh and in 2021, after spending a few years bouncing around random jobs for the team, cska announced that fedorov would be taking over as head coach. he went back to the team where all this started. now i don't know how exactly he is with his team but i sure hope he learned enough from his days there as a player under tikhonov on exactly how not to treat your players. cska won back to back gagarin cups (the trophy awarded to the khl team who wins the playoffs) in sergei'd first two seasons behind the bench, and they're probably looking to make it a threepeat with the playoffs starting today (?)

#ok so i did start this last night but it got a bit messy because i was so tired so had to redo it this morning. sorry it took so long #but when i say there's so much lore. i mean there is So Much Lore #tl;dr to me what makes him Special is his early days in the soviet union/his defection and his role in the russian five (and by extension #the championship teams in detroit in the late 90s) #oh and @ my wings mutuals if i got anything wrong help me out i did this all off the top of my head and don't have the time to fact check #everything