In the summer, many rightly thought that Dynamo had assembled the most balanced and deep roster in the KHL, at least not counting goalkeepers. SKA again had everything in abundance, which again led to the fact that star players ended up on the fourth line, but the Muscovites had those who should play on the lower lines. On paper, there was a good mix of coaches, high-quality foreign players, hard-working forwards, attacking defenders and local defenders without any obvious flexibility.
However, in reality, the season starts with five defeats in seven matches, while Alexey Kudashov’s team did not have the most difficult schedule at the start, but lost to, among others, Kunlun, Lada and Admiral. The vivid embodiment of the crisis was the goal of Admiral’s Stepan Starkov: he covered almost the entire field and the Dynamo defenders kindly crowded on the left side, making the task as easy as possible for the opposing striker.
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The constant scapegoat at the start of the season was new goalkeeper Hunter Miska. The American from the German league was initially presented as a “cheap and cheerful” option. Some good DEL players came to the KHL, but they always played for clubs that did not set themselves high goals (successful examples are Felix Schutz at Admiral, Matt White at Neftekhimik). Miska arrived after two playoffs, where Dynamo’s goalkeeping team performed frankly poorly, while the championship ambitions only became more powerful after strengthening. However, a goalkeeper with a save percentage below 90% is not Dynamo’s first problem.
After the first week of the season, we wrote that most foreign players in the KHL fail at the start of the regular season. This complaint against them is still relevant now: among the top 10 scorers, only the white, blue and red flags are visible. However, Dynamo’s foreigners not only cannot find their best form yet, but are also sinking the team. In the same match against Admiral, Eric O’Dell staged a festival of eliminations, receiving a six-minute penalty, and with CSKA, Cedric Paquette received the same three eliminations, in one of the episodes he simply rammed Ivan Prosvetov. If at their best the toughness of these players helped Dynamo, in the event of a crisis this turns upside down and leads to eliminations.
Cedric Paqueta
Photo: Dmitry Golubovich, “Championship”
The crisis of foreign players also affects the power play, where foreigners play a vital role both in the play and in burying the puck. On paper, not everything is bad: the conversion rate is 20%, but in absolute terms it is five goals in seven games, two of which were against Severstal. This does not reach the lethal level of last year, moreover it is balanced by the huge number of disposals, which also require efforts to neutralize. In general, if newcomer Max Comtois has started to improve in recent games, the big complaints so far are mainly directed at those whom Dynamo retained on two-year contracts.
At the same time, Alexey Kudashov, interestingly enough, was very careful with his words even in the pre-season. In an interview with “Championship”, for example, he said: “On paper we look beautiful, but I don’t want to say big words. Look at other teams, there is beauty there too.” “Give me time. We need to reform the team. On paper everything is fine, but in reality time will tell. We need to be patient, maybe at the start of the regular season we will get stressed,” the coach repeated in an interview with his colleagues from Sport24, given literally on the same days.
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Even after the victory over Severstal in the second match of the season, Kudashov repeated again: “It was not by chance that I said, and these were not empty words, that we would start the season and experiments would take a long time. September, October… I hope that everything will calm down by the middle of the season, because our newcomers are just beginning to understand some things and our combinations will be different.” Why did the coach insist so much on the importance of such coordination? It can be recalled that Kudashov’s teams more than once or twice experienced unpleasant periods of defeats, which occurred precisely at the end of September and October. One such home failure in 2017 cost Alexei Nikolaevich his place in Lokomotiv, and even reaching the conference final in the spring did not help.
But it is worth noting the situation of the team. The departure of Andrei Mironov is important not only in purely playing terms, but also for the team. The defender has long been the leader of the locker room, and now the captain’s post and responsibility have passed to Nikita Gusev. The current situation does not mean that Gusev is a bad captain, but it still takes time to establish new relationships. And although Kudashov denied that Canadians and Americans are not capable of creating “gangs” like the Brazilian ones in football, Kakhael’s story has repeatedly shown that North American organized crime groups in the locker room are quite real. Perhaps Kudashov was referring to this grinding?
Let’s take a special look at Miska, as the most criticized person on the team. Alexey Sopin didn’t have many obvious options in the spring. The Russian goalkeepers who became champions recently were either “homegrown” (Garipov, Nabokov) or were not the most obvious choices at the time of acquisition (Fedotov). The market for European goalkeepers is closed and the Americans who play in Europe are not much superior to Miska.
miska hunter
Photo: Alexander Safonov, “Championship”
For some reason, Alexey Sopin said in an interview that he was considering the possibility of offering Vladimir Galkin, but Avtomobilist, who really does not like to part with their players, would 99% repeat any offer from Moscow. Dynamo hardly had any safer options – the same Adam Huska, who was rumored to have an incomplete match in the playoffs in the senior league. So far, Miska, of course, has been marked by some failures, but most often they occur at moments when Dynamo has already lost the match.
Saying that Kudashov (Miska, Gusev, O’Dell) is to blame is tempting, but it is meaningless. Dynamo’s problems are complex and interconnected. However, we should not forget that in the current format of the KHL regular season, teams simply cannot do without slumps. Just a week and a half ago, Sibir, for example, looked like the most desperate team in the league, and how things have changed now.
