Was Petrov (mostly) invisible in the Rangers game?
Actually, no. He was pretty good against the Rangers. Showed off the slapshot all night, and executed a couple of other good plays, including one of the first true dump-ins (to Mikhailov) that I recall seeing from the Soviets. He made one very nice defensive play on the forecheck in the first period (stealing the puck just outside of the New York blueline and almost setting up a goal), and was the lone forward on a 5-on-3 PK, and played it well. And yes, the Rangers were a ****ing mess at that point, in spite of good on-paper personnel. The Park - Esposito trade was terrible for that team.
It was mainly the Montreal game where Petrov was disappointing. He made a lot of bad passes in that game, though he did come up with that one gem to Kharlamov.
All I can say is that Petrov is quite appreciated here in Finland (certainly more appreciated than in the 'ATD land'
); some old-timers even claim that he was the most important member of the line - which obviously isn't true, but still there isn't much of that 'weak link of the line' talk.
Petrov was, I think, definitely the third most important member of the line, but he certainly wasn't bad. The more I watch the Soviet team from this period as an adult, the stranger their system seems to me, and the more I realize how foggy the specifics of my memory have been. The centers almost never seem to be the primary puckcarriers on that team. More often than not, it is the right wings who are responsible for getting the play organized and moving the transition through center ice, which is just strange.
There is a persistent "theory" in the ATD community that Kharlamov was the primary puckcarrier on the K-P-M line and would have lost some scoring by modern standards because the Soviet league didn't record 2nd assists...but when I watch the video from 1976, it is clearly Mikhailov who is most responsible for setting up the play, while Kharlamov is playing a style of hockey that reminds one of Pavel Bure. Vikulov is setting the play from the right wing of the 2nd line, as well, and Maltsev from the right wing of the 3rd. I guess it actually makes a kind of sense. The system was designed to start moving east-west in the neutral zone (to include circling back) looking for an opening if the initial transition could not quickly get across the opposing blueline. Starting an east-west move from one wing would in some ways be easier than doing the same thing from center, as you'd have a greater space open in front of you after making the turn towards center. Is this Tarasov's system at work?
At any rate, it's wierd to see wings behaving more like centers and centers more like wings in a systematic way on that Soviet team circa 1976. Petrov was definitely not a typical center by north american standards, but he had a devastating shot, and seems to have been a pretty good all-around player. Hopefully, I'll have something more concrete to say about him when I'm done with the study.
edit: I have to get this out there because it's true: the Soviet centers were miserably bad at faceoffs during this period, Petrov included. I mean, they'd struggle against AHLers kind of bad. This is a skill they would pick up eventually, but the K-P-M generation obviously did not train very much on faceoffs when they were young.
