May 1st, and Hello, 2020-21!

Veteran scoring forward Roman Starchenko will be staying with Barys for the next couple of seasons, although the rest of the news from Day 1 of the signing season was not so good for the Kazakh club. (Image Source)

We are still miles from knowing when the next hockey games will be played, but May 1st nonetheless saw the opening of the 2020 off-season signing period in the various Russian leagues. The KHL, its 2019-20 season prematurely ended by the pandemic, is embarking on the era of the “hard” salary cap; a late attempt, led by CSKA Moscow, to get that limit raised to 1.3 billion rubles was voted down by the clubs last week, and it will remain at 900 million. The introduction of the “hard” cap should make for an active off-season, and indeed Day 1 of it saw some big moves. Read on, as we resume blogging here after a bit of a brain break, and take a look at the biggest of them!

May 1st saw one of the KHL’s 20-goal men of last season (there were 11 such, in the regular season) switch teams, as Corban Knight moved over to Avangard Omsk on a 2-year deal. The 29-year-old from British Columbia scored 20-21-41 in 60 games last season for Barys Nur-Sultan. Knight’s signing is the first move of what is likely to be an eventful summer for Avangard, who were disappointed at a lacklustre first-round playoff exit last season when they seemed to be legitimate Gagarin Cup contenders. Knight will join an attacking group that already has some very good players under contract like Sergei Shumakov, Kirill Semyonov, and a hopefully-recovered-from-injury Denis Zernov.

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Severstal Cherepovets are not one of the KHL’s glamour teams, but they had a busy and interesting time of it on May 1st. Forward Bogdan Yakimov was traded to SKA St. Petersburg for some cash, and, again for monetary return, Severstal sent forwards Dmitry Markovin and Alexander Petunin back to their former club Dynamo Moscow. But some interesting replacements were quickly on the way. Severstal took advantage of Admiral Vladivostok’s inability to take part next season to sign Canadian defenceman Shawn Lalonde and forward Denis Vikharev from the Far-Eastern club. Vikharev is a particularly nice story; Cherepovets-born, and a former junior player in the Severstal organization, the 27-year-old will now represent his hometown for the first time since 2016.

And Severstal weren’t done, bringing in two players from outside the KHL in Finnish two-way defenceman Veli-Matti Vittasmäki from Tappara of the Liiga, and also signing Czech forward Jindřich Abdul from former KHL club Slovan Bratislava in the Slovak Extraliga. Abdul was the top scorer in Slovakia last season, scoring 23-39-62 in 53 games, so it will be interesting to see how he gets on, especially as among his new team-mates is another Slovan alumnus in the promising young Adam Liška. None of these moves is likely to catapult Severstal into the ranks of the contenders, but they seem on paper at least to the kinds of solid deals that small teams have to make to be competitive.

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Marcus Nilsson. (Image Source)

HK Sochi have done very well indeed with players from Sweden in their brief existence; names like André Petersson and more recently Malte Strömwall come to mind in that regard. So it was no surprise to see the Black Sea club look to that counry once again this off-season with two very impressive-looking signings on May 1st; from Färjestad in the Swedish Hockey League are arriving forwards Linus Johansson and Marcus Nilsson. The 27-year-old Johansson was Färjestad’s captain last season, while the undersized 28-year-old Nilsson rode his skill as a playmaker to the league scoring title (50 gp, 12-42-54). While such signings do have the potential not to work out, the Swedish league is a good one, and HK Sochi can be genuinely optimistic about getting a boost from these new signings as they look to get back to the playoffs after missing out in 2019-20.

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Lokomotiv Yaroslavl, it would seem, figure that they can win it all at this point. All the rumours of the last month have suggested a major push by the Yaroslavl team this summer, and indeed they started early, as May 1st saw Lokomotiv make two very significant signings, both at the expense of Barys Nur-Sultan. Incoming is goalie Eddie Pasquale, who in this first KHL campain in 2019-20 put up a 93.3 sv% over 51 games, including stopping 145 of 151 shots in the first round of the playoffs. And also arriving from the Kazakh capital: Finnish defenceman Atte Ohtamaa, whom Barys signed at the November break last season. That meant a shortened campaign for the 32-year-old, but he still put up 21 points in 36 games, best in his six-year KHL career (pro-rated over the entire season, that pace would have put him comfortably top-five among defenceman for points). Pasquale and Ohtamaa will likely also find a familiar face behind the Lokomotiv bench; the team is expected to hire former Barys head coach Andrei Skabelka in the near future.

There will be some significant departures from Lokomotiv this off-season; Forward Stéphane Da Costa will move to Ak Bars Kazan (move to be made official soon, I expect), while young attacker Grigory Denisenko is headed overseas to the NHL and the Florida Panthers. But further reinforcements may also be on the way — in fact Lokomotiv have also reacquired towering defenceman Ziyat Paigin, who spent last season with Neftekhimik.

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For Barys Nur-Sultan, the above-discussed departures of Knight, Pasquale, and Ohtamaa meant that it was a fairly dismal May 1st for the Kazakh club, with rumours of coronavirus-related financial difficulties floating around in the background. But it wasn’t all bad news for Barys today; the club has signed a new two-year deal with one of their original KHL players, forward Roman Starchenko. Starchenko has been with Barys since the founding of the league in 2008, and he’s been a reliable scorer throughout; at 33, he put up a line of 18-17-35 in 58 games last season, and the two most recent campaigns have been his best two in terms of points. It’s a legitimate good signing, although Barys do now have some work to do to fill gaps elsewhere in the lineup.

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There may not be a team that finds itself under more scrutiny than CSKA Moscow this summer — the already-confirmed departure of forward Mikhail Grigorenko (he signed with Columbus last month), plus the near-certain exits of star netminder Ilya Sorokin, talented young defenceman Alexander Romanov, and the KHL’s best goal-scorer Kirill Kaprizov mean that CSKA will have some huge roster holes to fill. It is no surprise, in other words, that it was CSKA who led the charge to raise the salary cap. However, with that initiative defeated, the re-tooling begins in earnest. CSKA made a couple of signings today, acquiring goalie Alexander Sharychenkov from Neftekhimik Nizhnekamsk and a veteran former NHLer in forward Andrei Loktionov from Metallurg Magnitogorsk. Solid-enough moves, both of them, but we should expect a lot more to come from CSKA.

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There were some other moves today that are worth a quick mention; one of my favourite KHLers, forward Oleg Li, is headed to Sibir Novosibirsk Oblast after splitting last season between SKA and Ak Bars, while Metallurg have re-signed goalie Vasily Koshechkin to a new deal (we still await word on the plans of Mr. Sergei Mozyakin). And Avtomobilist Yekaterinburg, themselves re-arming after a disappointing 2019-20, have signed Vityaz Moscow Oblast’s all-time leading scorer, Alexei Makeyev. The rest of the deals can probably wait until the individual team previews begin in July. However, there will be more developments over the weekend, and tomorrow or Sunday we will have another post like this one, with some more of the bigger pieces of news. Thank you for reading, and it’s good to be back!