After the WJC triumph, as we already pointed out two weeks ago, Russian juniors' popularity in the KHL is raising. Teams are now more likely to ice young players and some players now get some deserved attention. Let's take a look at some more examples.
One of the KHL and RSL plagues has been the overlooking of some of the non-veteran players. After all, most of the players who left Russia for the CHL in recent years actually left because they had no reasonable alternative.
The November Subway Super Series is a good chance to see some players that we wouldn’t normally have a chance to see, and this year it looks like the best candidates for late draft selections are center Daniil Sobchenko and winger Anton Burdasov.
While the echo of the sensational hat trick by Maxim Kitsyn still goes on, this week let’s try and track down Russian players in the CHL. Many players from the Motherland crossed the ocean this summer and it’s interesting to see how they are doing.
After more than a month of KHL play it’s easy to figure out who’s hot and who’s not among prospects.
This year, in NHL camps there are more Russians than usual - a total of 48 Russian players are training with the different NHL franchises. So far there have been several impressive showings.
Many Russian players moved from Russia to North America this summer and more than 15 players are going to play in the CHL system. There are also some returnees, like goalkeeper Ramis Sadikov (Erie Otters, OHL).
As with the last few years, a number of players moved from the KHL to America. Sure there have also been some transfers the other way around, such as Evgeny Nabokov signing a 4-yr deal with SKA St. Petersburg or Tuesday’s news of Yann Danis signing with Amur Khabarovsk, but let's focus on the chances of the relatively unknown former KHL players with their NHL clubs.
First of all thanks to all the ones who showed up during the NHL Draft live chat powered by DobberHockey, it was truly a great experience.
But what to say about the draft? Well, the first round went very well, from a Russian point of view, with three players drafted, Alexander Burmistrov (Atlanta Thrashers), Vladimir Tarasenko (St. Louis Blues) and Evgeny Kuznetsov (Washington Capitals).
Just in the last few days, the St. Louis Blues got a “one in, one out” deal with Russian prospects. Evgeny Skachkov, whose agent announced that he signed an ELC with the Blues, signed instead a three-year deal with KHL reigning champions Ak Bars Kazan, while blueliner Nikita Nikitin signed with them for real, as reported on their official site.
But now it’s the NHL draft time and thus most of the attention is focused on prospects. Some time ago I wrote about Maxim Kitsyn, now I’m going to write about some underrated prospects. There are three players whose stock is rather low in North America, mostly because of the lack of visibility for scouts, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t good players or have less potential than other, but more known, players.
