From Kazakhstan To The NHL
Coming from a small hockey-crazed city in Kazakhstan, Evgeni Nabokov went on to win the Calder Memorial Trophy and become one of the top NHL goaltenders of the 2000s.
Ust-Kamenogorsk is an industrial city of about 320,000 in Eastern Kazakhstan near the Chinese border.
The city is known for having a large ethnic Russian population and for their mining of minerals such as uranium and zinc. It is also the biggest hockey hotbed in all of Kazakhstan, producing by far more national team players over the years than any other…
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