Earlier this month, the Hockey Hall of Fame inducted its 2024 class of honorees, including former Detroit Red Wings forward Pavel Datsyuk. The prodigiously-skilled Datsyuk, known as “the Magic Man” for his puck-handling abilities, became the tenth Russian or Soviet player to be named to the Hall of Fame, and the eleventh Russian or Soviet […]
Russian Players in the Hall of Fame: Who Should Be Next? (Part 1) Read More »
There was a time when Spartak Moscow were one of the giants of Russian and European hockey. Through the Soviet era, Spartak, sponsored by various trade unions, were always the “people’s team,” fierce rivals of the army men of CSKA Moscow and the KGB’s Dynamo club. While they never enjoyed the success of mighty CSKA,
Red-and-White Renaissance? Read More »
For the KHL’s lone Kazakh club, 2024-25 has already been a miserable slog, and the campaign is only a quarter over. We wrote about the firing of head coach David Nemirovsky from Barys Astana here just a few weeks ago, when the team was 1-5 – the club eventually decided to go with a veteran
More Changes at Barys Astanay Read More »
This past spring saw some good news – sort of – for Lokomotiv Yarovslavl. The club from the banks upper Volga, best known for the tragedy of September 7th, 2011, made its return to the Gagarin Cup Finals for the first time since the KHL’s inaugural season of 2008-09. On that earlier occasion Lokomotiv were
Edmonton Oilers Connections Help Lokomotiv Yaroslavl Lead the KHL Early Read More »
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
Arrival and Departure in the KH Read More »
At some point in the quite-near future, two major individual records are going to fall in Russia’s KHL, and they’re going to fall to the same man. Vadim Shipachyov (or Shipachev) is 37 now, and his last couple of seasons at Ak Bars have seen a fairly significant drop-off in his once-prodigious point totals. This
Vadim Shipachyov Closes in on Some Major KHL Records Read More »
In the interests of full disclosure, this piece is largely copied, pasted, and updated for 2023-24 from an article I wrote at my old blog about four years ago (Good Lord, has it really been that long?). The goal of that piece was to explain the phenomenon of young Russian NHL draft picks getting very
Revisiting the KHL’s “Designated Junior” Rules Read More »
Any new hockey season anywhere in the world, as it gets underway, will almost immediately produce any number of “I wonder how this is going to end” storylines – those players, or teams, or situations that catch our interest, and keep us checking back in with the results, standings, and news stories. The 2023-24 campaign
Early KHL Storylines, 2023-24 Edition Read More »
Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League began its 16th season on Friday, and along with it came the usual collection of storylines for interested fans to follow. But there was one KHL storyline that quickly pushed all the others to one side, and it did so the moment that 26-year-old Ivan Dmitrievich Fedotov skated out to guard
A New Twist in the Fedotov Saga Read More »
And so the Ivan Fedotov saga has a new twist. To recap: the 26-year-old goaltender, Finnish-born but of Russian nationality, was largely an after-thought when the Philadelphia Flyers drafted him in the 7th round of the 2015 NHL draft. However, he put himself on the radar in a big way with his 2021-22 campaign, which saw
Ivan Fedotov, the KHL, and the NHL Read More »