One of the results of the first two weeks of the regular season of the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) was Pavel Datsyuk's excellent performance.

The 42-year-old Avtomobilist forward is the second top scorer of his team and is in the top 15 of the league.

Every year, there is talk around Datsyuk that, due to his age, he can no longer bring as much benefit as a younger player could.

Moreover, last season, the veteran was constantly worried about injuries, because of which he missed a lot of matches.

However, on July 10, Avtomobilist risked signing a new contract with him, and now it is Datsyuk who is the oldest KHL hockey player of the current season, which became for Datsyuk the 25th in his professional career.

The debut of the future Olympic champion in the Russian championship took place back in 1996 as part of the Yekaterinburg "Spartak".

Perhaps the fact that Avtomobilist was headed by Bill Peters, a former assistant to Mike Babcock at the Detroit Red Wings, for which the Russian hockey player had played for 15 years, played a role.

Although Peters mainly specialized in working with defenders, after three years at the same club with Datsyuk, the Canadian specialist should know perfectly well what the striker is capable of.

As a result, Datsyuk, who in the spring became the team's top scorer in the uncompleted playoffs, not only retained his place in the team, but also became its captain instead of Nigel Daws, who left for Ak Bars.

He was assigned the role of a player of the first and second link, despite the fact that his salary in the club does not at all correspond to the assigned status - according to some sources, he will receive about 15 million rubles per year, although until recently he earned at least 100 million rubles.

Datsyuk began to live up to expectations from the very first match of the new season.

In the third period of the meeting with Traktor, the 42-year-old striker gave two assists and helped the team to win.

First, he rolled the puck on the move to Alexei Makeev, and then helped Dan Sexton escape to someone else's goal.

In the next game against Spartak, Datsyuk did not take effective action, but at the same time spent more than 21 minutes on the ice - the last time he played so much in SKA before he turned 40.

A home game with Kunlun Red Star three days later allowed Datsyuk to open his scoring account.

At the end of the first period, the striker entered a foreign zone without resistance, took the puck and powerfully threw it at someone else's goal.

The sensors recorded that it flew at a speed of 108.7 km / h.

So Datsyuk at the age of 42 years and 50 days became the third among the oldest KHL snipers, bypassing Oleg Petrov.

The oldest authors of goals in the KHL:


1) 42 years and 254 days - Vyacheslav Kozlov


2) 42 years and 100 days - Sergey Fedorov


3) 42 years and 50 days - Pavel Datsyuk 👇 pic.twitter.com/rk4Lf05ucW

- KHL (@khl) September 8, 2020

In the next two matches with Torpedo and Neftekhimik, Datsyuk scored one point for assists.

In total, at that time, he scored 200 points during his performances in the KHL, having spent 252 matches on this.

The jubilee pass to Anatoly Golyshev also brought Avtomobilist a victory over Nizhnekamsk.

With five points in five matches, Datsyuk could already be considered a hero at the start of the regular season, but he did not stop there.

The second meeting with Kunlun Red Star was the most productive for the veteran.

Towards the end of the first period, Datsyuk brought Avtomobilist forward, and immediately after the break he again became Golyshev's assistant, who in the majority scored his hundredth goal in the KHL.

At the end of the game, Peters noted that he was not at all surprised by the performance of the 42-year-old veteran.

“Datsyuk is an elite, thinking player who creates chances.

There are very few such players in the league, so I am not surprised by his game, "- quotes a TASS specialist.

As a result, Datsyuk scored seven points in six matches.

In the list of the team's top scorers, he is second only to Sexton with eight points.

The Olympic champion also looks good against the background of the rest of the league players - at the end of 16 regular season only 14 hockey players, in addition to him, scored at least seven points.

At the same time, among the Russian players, Datsyuk shares the second place with Anton Burdasov, Dais Zaripov, Sergei Tolchinsky and Vadim Shipachev.

Finally, it is Datsyuk who leads the KHL regular championship in terms of usefulness.

He makes an impressive +9 for the striker after six games.

In the presence of Datsyuk, "Avtomobilist" did not concede a single goal.

It is not surprising that at the same time, Yekaterinburg residents are leading in the Eastern Conference and have never lost in regular time.

True, they also did not have serious rivals yet - the first should be Avangard, with which Datsyuk's team will meet at home on September 20.