The day before, Dinamo Moscow held the last press conference dedicated to summarizing the results of the blue and white KHL season. The main question for the president, the chairman of the board of directors of the capital club, Viktor Voronin, was the discussion about the future of the team’s coach, Alexei Kudashov. The Dynamo boss himself understood this and quickly put an end to this problem.
“The key answer that you all want to know from me. Alexey Kudashov will continue working at Dynamo. The agreement with the specialist is for two years,” Voronin summarized in his speech.
It is necessary to immediately emphasize the main point: it was not Dynamo who kindly gave Kudashov a new opportunity to continue his work in the organization. The 52-year-old coach had several alternative options to spare, which in terms of attractiveness were not inferior to the blue and white proposal. Plus: one of the options was much more favorable in terms of comfortable work. Kudashov was invited to Kazan for a multi-year contract, but Alexey Nikolaevich had not yet finished all matters in his local club.
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“We are very grateful to Alexey Kudashov for his desire to work at our club. For him, the letter “D” and “Dynamo” themselves are not an empty phrase. I can’t tell you much, but I want to express my deep gratitude to Alexey Nikolaevich for all his work. “Dynamo means a lot to him,” said Sergei Sushko, general director of the Moscow club.
Kudashov signed a two-year contract with Dynamo and next season will be his fourth at the club in this position. During each of the previous seasons, the experienced coach always coped with the tasks assigned to him, which changed and transformed every year depending on the new vector. In the last regular season, Kudashov and his coaching staff even surpassed the goal, winning the Continental Cup, although before the start of the season the goal was to get into the top 3 according to the results of the soft part of the season. But the coach wins, more despite than because of it.
For the capital organization, which has not won a title since 2014, winning the Continental Cup is in itself a great success. Although Kudashov himself always emphasized that he did not consider this title a great personal victory. Ahead of Dynamo there was a performance in the playoffs, where the team suffered a failure. In the second round, the blue and white team “burned” Traktor (0-4), failing to complete the second part of the season’s goal of reaching the semifinals of the Gagarin Cup.
Alexei Kudashov
Photo: Pavel Tabarchuk, foto.khl.ru
The key reasons for the dry series defeat against Chelyabinsk are on the surface. First of all, the team was disappointed by the goal line, which was defeated in all aspects in the duel with Zach Fucale. Of course, Dynamo’s failure had other reasons, which Kudashov himself briefly mentioned yesterday at a press conference.
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But the situation with the goalkeepers turned out to be a big problem for Dynamo. Suffice it to say that in three of the four matches of the series, the Dynamo coaching staff had to replace the goalkeeper during the matches. That leap did not come from a good life. The main goalkeeper Ilya Konovalov, frankly, did not have a successful series, and the young debutant in the playoffs Maxim Motorygin turned out to be mentally unprepared for the fourth match, when the blue and white already needed a real miracle.
In turn, in the opposing goal, Fucale performed simply excellently, not allowing any failure in a single match. How important Zach is as a player for his team could be clearly seen at the beginning of the series with Lokomotiv, when Fucale was injured and Traktor instantly collapsed, no longer getting the required effect from his goalkeeping line.
In the playoffs, sometimes small details decide everything, while Dynamo’s key line fell into the abyss. We must understand that the constant deficiencies of goaltenders do not go unnoticed by field hockey players. Seeing that everything is going wrong on the last line, whether they like it or not, the players begin to lose confidence and at every opportunity they look back in alarm, searching for the puck in their goal. With all this, in each of the matches played Dynamo beat the Chelyabinsk team according to the notorious XG statistics, which count the creation of scoring chances. But this already favors the poor.
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The past playoffs clearly highlighted other weak points of the current Dynamo, roughly described those very weak points, the correction of which will help take the next step in the development of the Club. In the Gagarin Cup, the Muscovites lacked depth on the bench and adequate rotation in the youth ranks. The serious progress of Yegor Rimashevsky and Igor Chernyshov, which, by the way, is the merit of the coaching staff, is excellent, but both hockey players played their first playoffs at the adult level, and to carry out serious tasks now figures of a slightly different type.
At the close of the deadline, Dinamo had several options to reinforce its squad. Information appeared in the press that one of them was the acquisition of Marat Khusnutdinov from Sochi. And indeed it is. But the transfer was interrupted due to the slowness of certain people in the Moscow club. The Dynamo sports block had other options to create the necessary depth, but the management simply ignored it, saying that you have Gusev and the foreigners, play with them.
Now let’s move on to the same evil Kudashovs who are still in the leadership of the organization. The so-called advisors. At Dynamo matches you can see a striking picture of how some people in the club’s box openly support the visiting teams in order to have the opportunity to trip Kudashov, and when the capital team leads the game with a big score , these people leave the stadium, abruptly losing all interest in the game.
What about the problem of the local ice, which during the championship in the Dynamo locker room only the lazy did not criticize, but no one tried to correct this situation in the club? Maybe Alexey Nikolaevich and his coaching staff should serve the ice themselves? And this happens at home. It is simply impossible to imagine a similar development of events in any other club that declares solutions to serious problems. This is how Dynamo’s entire vertical is structured. Kudashov sees all this perfectly, understands it, but continues his fight.
Inside the locker room, which is what the coach must do directly, there is an excellent microclimate. And these are not empty words. Could you imagine that Nikita Gusev, who suffered a serious injury, would fight with the same zeal and diligence for the coach in his previous team? In the series against Dinamo Minsk, Gusev suffered damage equivalent to a broken rib, but he found the strength to continue in the playoffs and at the same time remained Dinamo Moscow’s best player. Let’s not forget Cedric Paquette, who finished the playoffs with a serious fracture.
“Dynamo”
Photo: Vladimir Bezzubov, photo.khl.ru
The KHL’s leading regular season scorer has a one-year contract that expires at the end of April and there is no doubt that if the coach were to change, Nikita would quietly continue his career elsewhere. For example, in the place where Kudashov himself would go to work. And this is not blackmail. This is a completely normal phenomenon in professional sports. Gusev can earn his money on about 10 other teams in this league. Thus, Nikita can choose the best conditions for him in terms of comfort, and working with a trainer that suits him is the most important factor when making a decision.
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With Kudashov, other key hockey players such as Jordan Weal and Eric O’Dell remain with the club. Wil, 31, would have a big fight in the transfer market. It is known that the striker had a specific interest in Avangard and Magnitogorsk, who were ready to offer the Canadian more favorable financial conditions than in Moscow. But Jordan opted for Dynamo.
The extension of the contract with Kudashov now allows for specific reinforcements, instead of a new restructuring, which would set the capital team back several kilometers. Dynamo’s top management made the right bet for the right reason and now Kudashov will do everything in his power to win with his home club. But it will be very difficult for you.
