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 very limited ice-time for their KHL teams, something that tends to cause a bit of puzzlement and angst for fans of the players’ NHL clubs. Vancouver Canucks fans went through this watching Vasily Podkolzin play 8:49 per game for SKA St. Petersburg in 2019-20, while fans of the Montréal Canadiens were similarly bothered when Alexander Romanov played only 11:23 per game in 2018-19, and 12:53 the year after (he played even less in the KHL playoffs). More recently, and even before he was drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers this past summer, Matvei Michkov’s 7:47 per game for SKA St. Petersburg in 2021-22 raised eyebrows on this side of the ocean. I could go on. And the short answer to the question of why this happens is that the KHL has rules specifically designed to allow young players to get some KHL ice-time while still being heavily sheltered by their teams; read on for a more detailed look at the substance of those rules.
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To start with, the rules that we are concerned with for this post are included in the KHL Sports Regulations for 2023 (link is a PDF, in Russian). The relevant rules are in section 33, which deals with KHL and MHL team rosters (the MHL is Russia’s top junior league, equivalent to the Canadian Hockey League or the USHL in North America), and section 41, which talks about game lineups. As regards young players, the main thing is this: A KHL team, for each game, is given two extra optional lineup spots which may be used only for junior-age players. Of course, there are a few interesting ifs, ands, or buts involved, so here are the details of the KHL’s Designated Junior rule (incidentally, the “Designated Junior” moniker for the rule is my own, but it fits and it works, so I use it).
A KHL team roster, from which the game lineup for each KHL match is chosen, can have no more than 25 players, age 17 and up. Age, here, is determined by the player’s birth year and the “start-year” of the current season, regardless of when the player’s actual birthday occurs. So, for example, “17-year-old” for the purposes of a 2023-24 KHL roster means any player born in 2006, an “18-year-old” is any player born in 2005, and so on.
In addition to the KHL roster, each KHL club except Kunlun Red Star Beijing also has a junior (U20) team playing in the MHL, Russia’s top-tier men’s U20 hockey league. An MHL roster can have up to 35 players between the ages of 17 and 20 inclusive, with age calculated on the same basis as above. 16-year-olds can be included on the roster, but only with special permission from the MHL. So, for 2023-24, players born from 2003 to 2006, inclusive, are eligible for the junior league, plus players born in 2007 if they get the special permission.
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Now we get to the heart of the matter. For each KHL match, a game lineup of 21 players (18 skaters plus three goalies — see below for discussion of the goalie situation!) is selected from the KHL roster. However, KHL teams are able to dress in addition, for each game, two young skaters from the club’s junior roster. One of these “Designated Juniors” can be up to 20 years old, and one up to 19 (so, for this current season, one player can have a birth-year of 2003 or later, and the other must have a 2004 or later birth-year). For Russian KHL teams, the Designated Juniors must be Russian, but there are no nationality restrictions on them at all for the non-Russian clubs. So the full lineup for a KHL game, if both Designated Junior spots are used, is 20 skaters plus three goalies.
Note that there is no maximum number of junior-age players that may be used in a KHL game lineup. However, there are only two “Designated Junior” spots, so any young players beyond those two will need to take up not only a regular game-lineup spot, but a spot on the 25-player team roster as well.
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The Designated Juniors must be skaters — neither spot can be given to a young goalie. That’s a relatively recent change in the rules (2015 or so, if memory serves), and it came about because teams were mis-using the rule. KHL clubs in the past often used one of their Designated Junior spots for the backup goalie, which essentially gave them an extra skater spot in the lineup to fill with an experienced player. It worked fine… up until the starting goalie got hurt or was ineffective, and the Designated Junior backup had to go in and face KHL shooters. A stark example of the possible result was what happened to 18-year-old Avangard Omsk goalie Denis Kostin in 2013-14. That season, Avangard couldn’t find a capable starting netminder for love nor money, and poor Kostin ended up appearing in relief five times and starting twice in a ten-game early-season stretch; it didn’t go well for him at all, and before the end of the season he was down in the second tier of Russian junior hockey rebuilding his shattered confidence. Kostin did recover, I am happy to say, and made the Russian World Juniors team as the third-stringer in 2014-15; since then, he has settled into a honourable journeyman’s career path, and is currently the backup to Anton Krasotkin at Sibir Novosibirsk. However, the entire mess would have been avoided had the rule not made it so easy for Avangard to use a teenage goalie as backup in every game. So, the upshot is that Designated Junior goalies are no longer allowed.
The KHL Sports Regulations, however, now provide KHL clubs with a way to get young goalies a taste of the big league without throwing them to the wolves. As of 2021, a KHL team may (it is not mandatory) include a third, “Reserve,” goalie, who functions as an Emergency Back-up (an EBUG, in North American parlance). This goalie is not on the bench during the game, and if he is called upon to play, neither the starting goalie nor the “regular” backup can re-enter the game thereafter. The Reserve goalie does not have to be a junior player, but he can be, and many clubs use the Reserve spot to get one of their youngsters some time around the KHL squad; so, for example, today’s game between Ak Bars Kazan and Severstal Cherepovets saw both teams use a 2005-born netminder (Ivan Blashkov for Ak Bars and Matvei Malygin for Severstal) as the Reserve.
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There is one other interesting little wrinkle in the Designated Junior rules. If a player has dressed as a Designated Junior for at least 30% of his KHL team’s games in the current season, and is called up to the U20 national team, then as long as he is away on that national-team duty, his KHL team can use his Designated Junior spot on a player of any age. For non-Russian KHL teams, this rule applies only if the young player is called up for his country’s U20 World Championship tournament; for Russian clubs, it applies in the case of any U20 international tournament (not necessarily IIHF tournaments). This little addition, enacted in 2017, is a bit of an incentive for teams to use their Designated Junior spots on particularly promising prospects. This rule is obviously now a little bit moot for the Russian junior players, given that the country is excluded from IIHF competition for the moment, greatly reducing the number of tournaments to which the rule might be applied.
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The purpose of the Designated Junior rule is primarily educational, of course. It allows junior-age players to get a bit of a sneak preview of life in a professional league, on and off the ice, and to absorb, hopefully, some pointers and techniques from their more experienced club-mates. And it gives the KHL team’s coach the ability to keep, meanwhile, a very strict rein on a young player’s ice-time without unduly affecting the rest of the team, since the coach usually has a full lineup on hand in addition to the junior players. So if, in the coach’s estimation, the young player’s performance, the game situation, or the opponent require such a move, he can plant the junior-age player on the bench without having to then double-shift another player. In fact, it is quite common for Designated Juniors to dress for games but not play at all. Spartak Moscow’s most recent match, against Lokomotiv Yaroslavl yesterday, featured 2003-born d-man Daniil Orlov and 2005-born forward Nikita Susuyev in the Red-and-Whites’ lineup; neither played a second in the game (Lokomotiv’s Yegor Surin, pictured above, played a grand total of 0:06).
The rule is not perfect, of course, and one of its problems is that it can lead to young players sitting around on KHL benches when it would be more useful for them to be playing regularly either with their peers in the MHL or in the minor-pro VHL (we’ll talk about VHL rosters and how they work another time — it’s complicated enough to need its own post or maybe even two — but let it suffice for now to say that the VHL is Russia’s equivalent of the AHL in North America). The above-discussed addendum to the rules, concerning junior-agers who are absent while playing for the U20 national team, probably exacerbates this particular problem, since it encourages clubs to keep young players in KHL lineups even if they’re not playing much. Another issue with the Designated Junior rule is that it can add some unnecessary chaos to a young player’s season. It is quite possible, and indeed not uncommon, for a junior-age player to spend time in each of the MHL, VHL, and KHL in a single campaign; that’s three different teams, with three different coaches, in three different leagues with three different calibres of opponent, even before we consider any time spent with one or more national teams.
Those are valid concerns, to be sure, but I remain a fan of the Designated Junior rule in the KHL. Properly used (and that is a very important phrase right there, one whose exact definition varies heavily depending on the junior-ager and the team), it can smooth a young player’s transition between junior and professional hockey, to the benefit of both the player himself and his club. It also adds some interest to the KHL, with new and promising young players constantly appearing in the league. In short, I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, particularly now that that loophole involving young goalies has been dealt with.
If you have any questions about the young-player rules, and about Designated Juniors, please to bring them up in the comments.
