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.

“Oh, that was a lot of years ago,” Sorokin said in a recent interview with The Post.

During the 2014-15 season, it was him and Kaprizov — who was just 17 — asking questions about what would become their futures.

“The KHL wasn’t the endgame for those guys,” Lashoff told The Post in a phone interview. “It was, ‘Hey, I want to play in the best league.’ And constantly asking and poking and prodding us from that perspective, which was pretty cool.”

At that point, the Islanders had Sorokin’s rights. GM Garth Snow drafted him in the third round in the summer of 2014. Whether Sorokin ever would go over to North America, though, and what it would look like if he did, was a wide-open question.

Nine years later, Sorokin has delivered the answer. His play is backstopping the Islanders in the midst of a playoff race. He has a .923 save percentage and will almost certainly finish with over 60 games played.

Though Sorokin’s teammates with the Islanders have answered the same questions endless times, they will jump to acknowledge he is the single biggest reason they have a chance to win every night.

His teammates from Novokuznetsk, though, will tell you that thanks to a massive time difference, Sorokin once experienced the NHL mostly via highlights.

Having a couple North Americans around who had a bit of NHL experience was tantamount to a gold mine of information for him and Kaprizov, whom he still counts as a close friend.

“For them the interesting thing was what are the cities like, what are the teams like, what are practices like?” Lashoff said. “Is the competition really that crazy?

“… It’s very difficult to watch games over there, and that was kinda cool ’cause we [the North American players] all had the NHL Network that we were streaming in or the NHL package that we were streaming in. So we’d sit down and watch games with these guys that weren’t necessarily live and pick out players that we knew or pick out things that they were doing and that kinda stuff.”

It doesn’t take much guessing to figure out what players they wanted to know about.

“It was young Russian guys that were curious about America and just all of the lore that comes with it,” said Cade Fairchild, another teammate. “At the time, [Alexander] Ovechkin and [Evgeni] Malkin. [Vladimir] Tarasenko had just come over. So they would constantly follow those guys and have a deep pride, tons of pride in their fellow countrymen that had made the jump.”

Sorokin himself described his mindset in Novokuznetsk as just trying to focus on what was in front of him as opposed to an NHL future. Even though the Islanders had his rights, he said he didn’t think much about the NHL before signing a contract in 2020, when he joined the team in the Toronto bubble.

That tracks with the mindset that’s helped him be so effective for the Islanders — focus on nothing but what’s in front of him.

Even getting traded to CSKA Moscow during the ’14-15 season, he said, was daunting.

“It wasn’t my choice [to go to Moscow], but I was 19, it was a trade and I went to Moscow,” Sorokin told The Post. “The first, maybe, couple of months, I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I wanted [to go] back to Novokuznetsk. But after that, it was better, better, better.”

The people surrounding Sorokin in Novokuznetsk, though, could see the kind of potential that made a move to Moscow or SKA St. Petersburg — the other historically dominant (and cash-rich) KHL power — all but inevitable.

“It was immediately obvious that the guy was already ready to fight at [age 18] for a place in the squad,” German Titov, the head coach of Metallurg at the time, told The Post via email. “The desire to work and improve his skills … in combination with his talent, it was clear that he had a great future.”

The Sorokin described by his Islanders teammates — a relentless competitor in practice who never gives up on a puck — was very much discernible at a young age. Novokuznetsk was a struggling team, and since 2017, it has played in the second division due to financial issues. But with Sorokin in net, they always had a shot.

“We gave up so many chances,” said Ray Giroux, a defenseman on the team. “Most nights — we didn’t win very many games — but he’d face 40 or 50 shots, and in hindsight, his being able to handle that at a young age, that adversity, proved to be something that was good for him to face at that age. And I think he handled it tremendously well.”

Fairchild added: “[Teammate] Ryan Stoa and I used to joke with each other that this kid’s gonna be one of the best goalies someday because of how many shots we give up. … It was amazing how many games we were in that we probably shouldn’t have been in because of him.”

There have been no shortage of nights this season when Sorokin has kept his teammates afloat — and a playoff bid alive — in that exact manner. His competitiveness is not a learned trait, but something innate within a goaltender who is now starring halfway across the world from Novokuznetsk.

“There’s a lot of teams, the starter believes he’s the starter and you can’t shoot high [in practice]. They have these things, these ideas in their heads and they don’t play the rebounds and they play the next shot,” Kurtis McLean, another teammate in Novokuznetsk, said. “Ilya had that quality where it was that puck until it was covered or it was in the corner and then he would set for the next one. If the next guy shot it, sorry, I was busy concentrating on that one.”

When Titov arrived in 2013, the then-18-year-old Sorokin was the third-string goalie. By the middle of that season, he was the starter.

“For two months, he proved with his work that he was ready to be the first goalkeeper,” Titov said, “because in some matches, we won thanks to his game.”

McLean compared Sorokin to Antti Raanta, a future NHL goalie he crossed paths with while playing in Finland. Lashoff likened Sorokin’s competitiveness to Tim Thomas, whom he played with during a stint in Boston.

Compared to the comps Sorokin draws now — Barry Trotz brought up Pekka Rinne’s name last year, and it’s all too easy to use the Rangers’ Igor Shesterkin, Sorokin’s close friend and countryman, as a benchmark — those sound downright quaint.

But, of course, that’s all much easier in hindsight than it was at the time. No one knew Sorokin would get this far, this soon. Least of all, Sorokin himself.

“I was always focused on the moment,” Sorokin said. “So when I signed [with the Islanders], OK, let’s go. Let’s go to work.”