![]() After falling behind 1-0 just 3:34 into the game, Lokomotiv rallied for the victory. That goal seems even more realistic following the team's 5-2 season-opening win at Sibir Novosibirsk. We have a good team and this is realistic. "Coach Rowe said we're here to win a championship. It's a huge honor and we want to perform well," Lepisto said. We're playing for the city and we're playing for the guys who passed away. On the anniversary of the crash, and with training camp now finished, the rebuilt Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team is ready to embark on a season in which it will be playing for more than just wins. The emotional preseason included a memorial game held by the Swiss League's Kloten Flyers, in which they played a team of NHL stars that included Evgeni Malkin, Pavel Datsyuk and Ilya Kovalchuk. ![]() Lokomotiv's exhibition play started in early August with a 4-1 loss to CSKA in Moscow, with hundreds of Yaroslavl fans turning out to support the squad. This is the most talent I've had since that team." "We had Eric Staal, Cam Ward, it was unbelievable. He knows exactly how we want to play," said Rowe, who sees similarities between this club and his 2004-05 Lowell team, which featured several players who won the Stanley Cup a year later with Carolina. "Mark is a guy that I contacted fairly early. Now called upon to represent Lokomotiv in Russia's top league, they're joined by former NHL players Viktor Kozlov, Curtis Sanford, Vitaly Vishnevsky, Niklas Hagman, Sami Lepisto and Mark Flood, who played under Rowe in Albany. Many of them represented Yaroslaval last season in the VHL, a second-tier league below the KHL. In assembling the roster, young prospects quickly went from being Lokomotiv's future to being their present. They joined a staff that included Jorma Valtonen, one of only two members of the club (along with player Maxim Zyuzyakin) not to travel with the team that fateful September day. NHL 2004 REBUILT CRASHING PRORowe added former NHL players Dmitri Yushkevich (who started his pro career in Yaroslavl) and Nikolai Borschevsky (a former Lokomotiv coach) as his assistants. Everybody here is focused to make sure we have a great season to celebrate what that team started last year." All the people here absolutely loved him. "I look at this as an opportunity to continue Brad's great work. We got to know each other pretty well," Rowe told NHL.com. So Brad came up and we spent a couple of hours talking about coaching. "When I was in Lowell, Mike Milbury called and said Brad wanted to get into coaching. Continuing McCrimmon's plan became a priority for Rowe, who previously worked as coach of the Hurricanes' American Hockey League affiliates in Lowell and Albany. By January, Yakovlev was ready to begin assembling a new team and he called Smith, who recommended former Carolina Hurricanes assistant Tom Rowe for the coaching job.īrad McCrimmon, a Stanley Cup-winning player and former NHL assistant who died in the crash, made his mark in the short time he served as Lokomotiv's coach. Tributes immediately poured in, including a tearful memorial at the Minsk arena where the team was scheduled to open the season. "When they decided it would be in their best interest to rejoin the KHL, they would." ![]() They were going to concentrate on their younger players and youth program," Smith said. "They're used to having a Yaroslavl team. On the one-year anniversary of the Lokomotiv plane crash tragedy, NHL.com honors the 44 people who lost their lives. Victims of 2011 Lokomotiv plane crash By Tal Pinchevsky - NHL.com Staff Writer But it wasn't the right time for club president Yuri Yakovlev, who played for Yaroslavl before taking it over in 1989. Hoping to salvage Lokomotiv's 2011-12 season, the Kontinental Hockey League offered to help assemble a new team. "I contacted and said I'd be happy to give a hand," former NHL general manager Mike Smith said of reaching out days after the tragedy. The recovery for Lokomotiv Yaroslavl began with a phone call from a stranger. The team this month returned to compete in Russia's top league with a remade roster featuring players promoted from the club's farm team, as well several imports from North American hockey circles. Yaroslav Lokomotiv was given a one-year hiatus from the KHL to rebuild its program. Of the 45 passengers, only a flight attendant survived in one of the deadliest aviation accidents in the history of sports. 7, 2011, an airplane carrying nearly all the players from the Kontinental Hockey League's Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice hockey team crashed less than 2,000 feet after takeoff for Minsk, Belarus.
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