Ask Matt Lashoff about a young Ilya Sorokin and he’ll start to paint a picture of a player curious about life 5,800 miles away.

When Lashoff, now retired, arrived in Novokuznetsk, Russia, in 2014 for one of the last stops of his journeyman pro hockey career, Sorokin was all of 19 years old — a wiry kid with broken English. Sorokin is a native of Mezhdurechensk, about 90 minutes east of Novokuznetsk, a city nestled in southwestern Siberia closer to the Kazakhstan and Mongolian borders than to Moscow or Saint Petersburg.

At 12, Sorokin moved from home to Novokuznetsk, where he was enrolled in a boarding school specializing in sports. The city, population just north of 500,000, is a heavily industrial area with a long list of natives who went on to NHL success, including current standouts Sergei Bobrovsky, Kirill Kaprizov and Dmitry Orlov.

Sorokin’s first taste of professional hockey would come there, when he was called up to the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) for five games in the 2012-13 season with Metallurg Novokuznetsk as a 17-year-old, and he would blossom into a star with the club before moving onto bigger and better things with CSKA Moscow and then the Islanders.