Career
Together with Igor Larionov and Sergei Makarov, he was part of the famed KLM Lincolnshire. He is considered one of the best hockey wingers of the 1980s. In the famous 1980 Olympic hockey game against the United States, dubbed the "Miracle on Ice," Krutov scored the Soviet"s first goal to enable his team to take an early 1-0 lead.
On the club level, Krutov played for CSKA Moscow from 1978 to 1989.
He was one of the first Soviet players to make the jump to the National Hockey League, doing so with the Vancouver Canucks in 1989. However, Krutov did not have a successful season, battling homesickness and weight problems.
Krutov left the National Hockey League after his lone season in North America and played for a number of smaller clubs the Swiss and the Swedish leagues before retiring to move into coaching. In 2010, he was inducted into the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame.
Krutov died in a hospital in Moscow on 6 June 2012, of internal bleeding and liver failure, just five days after his 52nd birthday.