We’re about three weeks into the 2024-25 KHL season at this point, which means that the big picture, though still very blurry, is starting to sharpen up a little bit – especially for those teams that are off to inauspicious starts… And NHL pre-season preparations are also in full swing now, meaning that players without contracts for the coming campaign may be starting to feel a bit worried. It all makes for interesting news stories of comings and goings in the Russian league; in this article we’ll check out one of each!
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Arrival:
In comes Anthony DeAngelo – the controversial former Coyote, Ranger, Hurricane, and Flyer has signed on with SKA St. Petersburg, having likely burned an excess of NHL bridges. The issue of foreign players in the KHL is a thorny one on both sides; it always has been, and the recent geopolitical upheavals have not helped matters. However, despite those issues and his own reputation as a difficult team-mate (not to mention the fact that he’s coming off a down season with Carolina), DeAngelo has enough skill as a playmaking d-man to attract some serious interest. It’s worth noting, too, that DeAngelo is still only 28 years old, with lots of time yet to turn things around and catch the eye of an NHL General Manager down the road.
And the KHL has long had a spot for players who found themselves in the “Undesirables” file in the NHL for hockey-related reasons or otherwise. In fact, among DeAngelo’s team-mates on the banks of the Neva this season are included names like Evgeny Kuznetsov, Mikhail Grigorenko, and Nikita Zaitsev, all of whom spent significant time in North America before the contract offers finally dried up. That’s some potentially very useful experience surrounding hotshot Montreal Canadiens forward prospect Ivan Demidov at SKA, even if that experience does come with a certain amount of personal and professional baggage.
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Departure:
Oh, it is hard to be a coach in the KHL! The seat is very hot, the leash is stranglingly short – you can insert the employment-instability-related cliche of your choice. And with September of 2024 not yet behind us, the first bench-boss casualty of the 2024-25 KHL season has already been inflicted, with the unwanted “honour” going to David Nemirovsky, fired earlier this week by Barys Astana. The KHL’s lone Kazakh team had begun the season 1-5, with that lone win coming in overtime; the final straw for Nemirovsky’s brief tenure (he was just hired by Barys in May) was a particularly dismal 4-1 defeat at the hands of Vityaz Moscow Oblast this past Saturday. Evgeny Korolyov comes in as interim head coach while Barys hunt for Nemirovsky’s permanent replacement. Korolyov’s debut on Tuesday was another loss, 3-1 to Dynamo Moscow, but there are beatable opponents (HK Sochi, Vityaz again) in the offing, so we’ll see what happens.
It’s harsh on Nemirovsky, of course, but such is life for a KHL bench-boss, as mentioned. Nemirovsky should get another look somewhere, too, although he may need to do a stint as an assistant to restore his reputation. In any case, he’s had an interesting hockey journey to this point: Canadian by birth and Russian by ethnicity, Nemirovsky played a few games in the NHL in the 1990s, and quite a lot of games in the old Russian Superleague and then in the KHL. He also represented Israel in international hockey.
And few short seasons ago, Nemirovsky looked like a real up-and-comer in the coaching ranks, particularly given his background on both sides of the ocean. His Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod teams between 2018 and 2022 gained a reputation for being dogged and difficult for any opponent, although they never quite broke through to the later rounds of the playoffs. But he was fired when Torpedo missed the post-season entirely in 2021-22, and he was then let go from his subsequent head-coaching gig, with Sibir Novosibirsk, in December of 2023 after just a few months in charge. Now, his employment at Barys has been even briefer than that, so we will see where he turns up next.
Patrick Conway is a writer based in Peterborough, Ontario. He previously covered Russian hockey at the Conway’s Russian Hockey blog, and he still keeps an eye on goings-on in that area.
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