I shake my head as Evgeni Malkin is honored for his 1,000th game, his Pittsburgh Penguins teammates taking part in his trademark stretching routine.

I shake my head at him racing out to 20 points through 19 games in his age-36 season, tracking to average a point per game or better for the 15th time in 17 seasons.

I’m not bitter, honest. That would be petty. I’m not a Penguins fan or a member of the Malkin family. I have no stake in the game. But every time Malkin adds to his enormous list of NHL accolades, I shake my head because I’m reminded of that ceremony. Yep. Los Angeles. All-Star Weekend 2017. The league celebrating its 100 greatest players ever and…somehow leaving ‘Geno’ off the list. It was an egregious oversight five-plus years ago and just looks sillier by the day.

Is Malkin…underrated? That doesn’t feel like the right way to distil the feeling. I’d be straw-manning it to simply call Malkin underrated when he owns a Hart Trophy, a Conn Smythe Trophy, two scoring titles, three Stanley Cup rings, a Calder Trophy and three first-team all-star selections.

But maybe it works to call him underrated as a superstar, underrated in terms of where he belongs among all the best forwards in NHL history. Playing his entire career under the shadow of what will likely be remembered as three of the 10 greatest players of all-time, Malkin has rarely been acknowledged as a borderline generational superstar in his own right. It’s like the late Dale Hawerchuk’s quietly amazing prime, sharing the NHL with Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, except, unlike Hawerchuk, Malkin did win everything there was to win.

How many players in NHL history have a Calder, Hart, two Art Rosses and a Conn Smythe Trophy: Three. The list: Bobby Orr, Mario Lemieux, Evgeni Malkin. Let it sink in again that this man was not named one of the NHL’s 100 greatest players and he had completed all those accomplishments by winter 2017.