Designated Juniors: The KHL’s Young Player Rules

SKA St. Petersburg’s 18-year-old Vasili Podkolzin. (Image Source)

About a year ago, we took a fairly detailed look here at the KHL’s rules on foreign players, so now I think it’s time to dive back into the league’s regulations once again. As with every season, the KHL has a number of intriguing young players seeing game action across the league; I could mention defenceman Alexander Romanov at CSKA, forwards Vasili Podkolzin of SKA and Grigori Denisenko of Lokomotiv, and of course others. But the KHL also has an interesting rule regarding young players: the “Designated Junior” rule that allows KHL teams to include “extra” junior-age players in their game-lineups. Read on, for an introduction to that rule, and some explanation.

To start with, the rules that we are concerned with for this post are included in the KHL Sports Regulations for 2019 (link is a PDF, in Russian). The relevant rules are in section 33, which deals with KHL and MHL team rosters, 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 2019-20 KHL roster means any player born in 2002, an “18-year-old” is any player born in 2001, and so on.

2002-born defenceman Shakhir Mukhamadullin, shown here with Salavat Yulaev Ufa’s junior team Tolpar Ufa, has seen some ice-time in the KHL in 2019-20. (Image Source)

In addition to the KHL roster, each KHL club also has a junior (U20) team, and all but two of these junior squads play in the MHL, Russia’s top-tier men’s U20 hockey league (Dinamo Minsk’s and Jokerit Helsinki’s U20 teams are the exceptions). 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 2019-20, players born from 1999 to 2002, inclusive, are eligible for the junior league, plus players born in 2003 if they get the special permission.

Now we get to the heart of the matter. For each KHL match, a game lineup of 20 players (18 skaters plus two goalies) is selected from the KHL roster. However, KHL teams are able to dress in addition, for each game, two young players 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 1999 or later, and the other must have a 2000 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 two goalies.

The Designated Juniors must be skaters — neither spot can be given to a young goalie. That’s a 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 of this is what happened to 18-year-old Avangard 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 playing for Avangard’s VHL affiliate, Izhstal Izhevsk. 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; if you want, or need, to have a junior-age netminder in the lineup (and teams sometimes do), he occupies regular lineup and roster spots.

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. This little addition, enacted in 2017, is a bit of an incentive for teams to use their Designated Junior spots on particularly promising prospects.

Note that there are no restrictions on the number of junior-age players that may be used in a KHL game lineup. However, there are a maximum of 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.

CSKA Moscow’s prospect forward Nikita Rtishchev. (Image Source)

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. CSKA Moscow dressed 19-year-old forward Nikita Rtishchev for the first two games of this season without him actually playing a shift — “watch and learn” seems to have been the motto in this case. Young Rtishchev was then sent to CSKA’s pro farm-team, Zvezda Moscow in the VHL, where he has been seeing regular time on the ice and scoring well.

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. Such befell SKA St. Petersburg’s 18-year-old Vasili Podkolzin, who played in all three of those above-mentioned leagues last season AND for both the U18 and U20 Russian national teams. The constant movement between teams likely did his development and his scoring numbers little good (oddly, the main beneficiaries may turn out to be the Vancouver Canucks, who found Podkolzin unexpectedly still available with the tenth pick of the NHL draft this past June).

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 closed. This season, I have begun to track the usage (particularly as regards ice-time) of junior-agers in the KHL, and once there is enough data to be worth talking about, we’ll talk about it! In the meantime, if you have any questions about the young-player rules, and about Designated Juniors, please to bring them up in the comments.

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Thank you for reading! Next up here, a look at Women’s Hockey League runners-up Dynamo St. Petersburg as they head into 2019-20.