Five ex-Toronto Maple Leafs are KHL teammates and one just scored an epic Game 7-winning OT goal
It turns out there might be an antidote to the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Game 7 curse — go play on the other side of the world.
Any Leafs fan worth their weight in salt could tell you the franchise is 0-6 in Game 7s since 2004, last winning one in 2004 by way of a first-round series win over the Ottawa Senators. In the more than two decades since, they’ve fallen on four occasions to the Boston Bruins, and once each to the Montreal Canadiens and Tampa Bay Lightning.
But for five ex-Leafs playing together on the KHL’s Ak Bars Kazan team in Russia, they were apparently not afflicted by their former franchise’s bad luck.
Alexey Marchenko, Alexander Barabanov, Egor Korshov, Nic Petan, and Kirill Semyonov were all on the winning side today of a 2-1 Game 7 first-round win over Avtomobilist Yekaterinburg.
Semyonov played hero in the series, getting credit for the series-winning goal in double overtime that looked to bounce around off a few Avtomobilist defenders in front of the net before finding the way in.
Double OT winner
Game 7 winner
Series winnerKirill Semyonov's got it all!#GagarinCup pic.twitter.com/1NnrNuhL3I
— KHL (@khl_eng) April 7, 2025
Barabanov had the longest NHL career out of the five, playing in 206 games, including 13 in Toronto to start his career in 2020-21. Petan played 170 NHL games (28 in Toronto), Marchenko played 121 (11 in Toronto), and Semenyov played just three (all in Toronto) before the Leafs agreed to terminate his deal in 2021.
Korshkov was infamously Toronto’s first pick of the second round of the 2016 draft but played just one NHL game before returning to Russia in 2020-21.
It wasn’t necessarily a happy day for everyone with a Leafs affiliation playing in the game, however.
Defenceman Jesse Blacker, a 2008 second-round pick by the Leafs, was on the losing end of the contest. He spent parts of four seasons with the Toronto Marlies but could never crack the NHL squad. He played one NHL game in his career with the Anaheim Ducks, eventually playing one year in Germany with the Nürnberg Ice Tigers before spending the last eight years in Russia with four different KHL franchises.
The five ex-Leafs now await their second-round matchup, which will be set tomorrow after another Game 7 involving another ex-Leaf, Josh Leivo, who made history by setting the KHL’s single-season goal-scoring record this year with 49 while playing for Salavat Yulaev Ufa.