Simulation Hockey League

I'm just going to rip the band-aid off and acknowledge something. Russia is not very good right now, and probably won't be all that competitive this season (now that the series has started, you can make your own assessment), but that is not a problem, and I'm here to tell you why. In the last few seasons Russia has seen some changes. Some of the veteran players and users have left, and this has left a void that needs to be filled. What used to be a roster full of familiar names is starting to look like a collection of random minor league players. That doesn't mean that there aren’t some amazing players who have made their impact not only on the IIHF scene, but the SHL one as well.

With that said, I would like to take you on a top to bottom review of this roster and highlight not the past, or present, but the future of where this team is heading. I would argue that the current roster has one of the brightest futures in the world. With a blend of veterans, current all-stars, and plenty of youth, I think that this roster will be plenty dangerous in a season or two once the players have some time to grow and build a bit of chemistry. So let's begin.

We can take a very high level view of the roster and focus simply on when they entered the league. I will confess that I may not have the most up to date information, but I'm going off of what I have.




The lion's share of the roster falls into S46, S55, or S49, with those three seasons making up 46% of the roster. The fact that 16% of eligible players falling into S55 highlights what I was saying earlier, there is plenty of youth waiting in the wings for their time. As those older players from the late S30s and early S40s age out, the roster will find a window where those players who are after S46 will be hitting their prime, and the young players will begin making their impacts felt. This will create a unique situation where the roster is filled with a combination of veteran players, and very young and hungry players.

Now that we have an understanding about the age of the roster, I want to take a look at the makeup of the roster. Are there positional needs that need to be addressed? Is there any surplus that could bottle neck the team? One of the challenges facing the league now is that players are becoming more niche to their position and role, as prior to the FHM era, players could be moved around a bit more due to the nature of the sim. Now, GMs need to be very aware of their roster makeup or they could risk having a young prospect waste time waiting for their chance to crack the roster.

This dilemma is arguably one of the things I am most excited about. This lack of chemistry, or luck of chemistry could see some major upsets and some interesting games moving forward. I digress, so let's move back to the Russian roster.


Russia’s roster is pretty well split up positionally.



The only real issue is the lack of wings. In the past Russia has moved some of their defensemen to the wing to cover for this, but with the loss of Evans to retirement, this won't be an option moving forward. Essentially, Russia has only seen 4 wingers join the roster between S51 and S55, and that is coming back to bite them. If we take a look at the positional active/inactive data we can see that Russia only has 4 active wingers, and two of them are <300 TPE at the time writing.



To anyone who is either looking to recreate or a winger looking to transfer, if you want immediate top line minutes, come to Russia.

This is the only real weakness at the moment, and unless something happens, it could be the only thing keeping Russia from being competitive for a long time. Outside of that, Russia is deep in the other positions. If we remove the inactives from the discussion then we have 6 Centers. This is a great position to be in as some of the Cs will be coming up as others start to age out. Defense is another area of strength for Russia, but I wouldn't expect anything else from a notoriously defensive team.
The current roster makeup, including the wing issue, gives Russia some flexibility moving forward. As players inevitably go inactive, or return to activity, they are able to move players into a role that best suits them. Now lets begin taking a look at reality instead of hypothetical and possibilities.


Here are the skaters who started for the S54 tournament. The TPE totals for the player, and the line total TPE. These values are taken from the player page of each player prior to the start of the tournament, so if they aren't current as of the time of writing, I am not at all sorry. Those who are bolded are active, and Evans has the asterisks because he has retired.
Just looking at this, the strength of Russia’s Cs is very obvious. Even on the 4th line they have a nearly 1100 TPE active. Then to contrast it, we can see the issues with the wingers, with a 418 TPE inactive on that 4th line. We can see how dependent the team is on the top two lines. Losing players like Evans or O’Koivu prematurely really impacted this roster as those were two names that were projected to be anchors on this roster. Now moving on to the defensemen.

        This group of players has been, and probably will always be the backbone to the Russian hockey team. Leading the team now are Igor Volkov and Piotr Horvat, both sporting 1100+ TPE, Volkov being S47, and Horvat S48 are both still relatively young and should be able to hold down the top pairing long enough for some of the younger players to develop and take over. Waiting in the wings are young defenders like Alexei Petrikov and Adrik Baranov who are both chomping at the bit to get a shot at proving themselves in the big league.
Let's take a second and summarize where we are so far. Russia is not great at this current moment in time, I don't think anyone is debating that or willing to die on that hill. The roster has some flaws, namely in its lack of forward prospects, but there are some bright spots, the combo of Zakkira Diporov and Pavel Kharlamov being one of them. The team is insanely deep at center, and if the concept of trading players was a thing, it would be worth looking at leveraging some of those assets to address the wing problem. The blue line is pretty solid right now, and will only get better with time.

      With all that said, I don't think Russia is due to win any medals this year, but if I were to bet, I would say they would probably be on the podium within two seasons. A lot of this is dependent on keeping those young players active and engaged while going through a culture shift in the locker room.

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Nice read. Igor would like you to know that he approves.

great article slowpoke

Zakkira Diporov approves!!