The 1972 Soviet squad surprised the heck out of us when they showed up in Montreal in 1972 to begin the Summit Series, and nobody surprised us more than the great number 17, Valeri Kharlamov, who was poetry in motion, and who gave the Canadians fits with his beautiful skating and puck handling.
What a player he was, and how sad it was when, at the age of 33, Kharlamov, along with his wife Irina, died in a car crash outside of Moscow.
His memory lives on, and now Russian filmmakers have put together a movie of his life called Legend No. 17, which you can see a glimpse of in the one minute and forty second trailer below.
In some ways it reminds me a little of the 2005 movie The Rocket.
Thanks to Denis Brel in St. Petersburg for passing this along. Denis mentions that the movie opens in Russia in just a few days.