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Utah Hockey Club defenseman Mikhail Sergachev (98), center Clayton Keller (9) and center Barrett Hayton (27) all celebrate together after a goal by Hayton during a NHL game between the Utah Hockey Club and the Anaheim Ducks at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City on Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024. | Brice Tucker, Deseret News
Mikhail Sergachev has scored points against all but two NHL teams. Unsurprisingly, those teams are the only two he’s never faced: his current Utah Hockey Club and his former Tampa Bay Lightning.
He’ll have two chances to correct that before the calendar flips to April, as the Lightning make their first visit to Salt Lake City on Saturday and Utah HC goes to Florida’s west coast on the 27th.
“I’m excited, nervous — I’m a human being,” Sergachev said of his anticipation for the two games. “But I try to treat it as a game for two points that we desperately need.”
Sergachev’s impact on the Lightning organization should not be understated — nor should the Lightning’s impact on him.
When a trade sent him there four games into his NHL career, he could have taken it as a sign that the Montreal Canadiens no longer saw the potential in him that they did when they drafted him a year earlier. But he didn’t do that.
Instead, he worked hard, established himself as one of the league’s better defensemen and won the Stanley Cup twice — even beating the Canadiens in the Final one of those years.
An unexpected trade
At the 2024 draft, Lightning general manager Julien BriseBois received an offer for Sergachev that he couldn’t refuse. It was a day before the no-trade clause kicked in on his eight-year contract, so it was a “now-or-never” situation for the team.
It caught Sergachev off guard. He said he was taking out the trash when he got a call saying he’d been traded. There’s always a cocktail of mixed emotions in situations like these, but after arriving in Utah, he realized that this could be the best thing for his career — and that’s exactly how it’s been so far.
It’s become customary in the NHL for a long-serving player to get a tribute video during his first game back in his old barn after switching teams. With the amount of time and success Sergachev had in Tampa, Amalie Arena should affix tissues to every seat — it’s going to be emotional.
But that’s not what Sergachev is focused on.
“I have no expectations,” he said. “That’s my mentality. It’s just going to be a hockey game and whatever comes with it comes with it. It’s going to be cool, probably, but I try not to think about it.”
MVP?
Sergachev probably doesn’t have the counting stats to win the Hart Trophy, which is awarded annually to “the player adjudged to be the most valuable to his team,” but by definition he probably deserves some consideration: Few players have impacted their teams as much as Sergachev has helped Utah HC.
To this point in the season, he’s averaged more ice time per game than all but three other skaters in the entire NHL. He’s relied upon in every situation, both offensively and defensively. He’s not the most outspoken guy in the room, but he leads by example with the demeanor of a 20-year veteran (even though it’s only his eighth full season).
Sergachev has already broken his career high in goals with 13. He’s also third on the team in assists (32) and fifth on the team in points (45).
Leading ‘the right way’
Although he’s always been an excellent hockey player, Sergachev didn’t always have this type of responsibility. As a member of the Lightning, he was the young guy being helped along by veterans. Now, he’s relied upon to provide that same type of leadership for the host of youngsters on his new team.
And he’s trying to do it the “right way.”
“We’re learning every game because we have such a young group,” Sergachev said in a late-February interview. “In Tampa, the guys were already experienced. They played a Stanley Cup Final before. Here, it’s a bit different. We’re still a young group. We have that learning ability — to learn the right way, not the hard way."
The “hard way” to which he’s referring is dominating the regular season, only to fizzle out in the playoffs. That’s what happened to the Lightning in 2019. After tying the all-time wins record in the regular season, they got swept in the first round of the playoffs by the eighth-seed Columbus Blue Jackets — a team that had never won a playoff series before.
Rather than having to suffer another historic collapse, Sergachev is doing his best to help the league’s fifth-youngest team learn from both its wins and its losses in the regular season. It’s unlikely that they’ll contend for the Cup in their first few seasons, but the idea is that once they get there, they can start making deep playoff runs right away.
When asked what he learned during his time in Tampa, Sergachev kept it concise: “Winning.”
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