2022 Olympic Preview: Team ROC

The Olympic men’s tournament starts tomorrow (Feb. 9) and KHL. ru completes its survey of the competing teams with a look at the defending champion, Team ROC.

History and honors

Soviet hockey made its Olympic debut in 1956 and got off to a flying start with gold in Cortina d’Ampezzo. Team USSR won all seven of its games, with a 40-9 goal differential, and the highlight was a 2-0 verdict against the seemingly invincible Canadians. In the next eight Games, the Red Machine won six golds and the bronze and silver medals collected in 1960 and 1980 were deemed less than satisfactory.

The break-up of the Soviet Union meant that in 1992 the country competed as the Unified Team, winning one more gold. Subsequently, Russia took up the mantle — but in six competitions it medalled just twice, with silver in 1998 and bronze four years later. In 2018, with Russia under sporting sanctions, the “Olympic Athletes from Russia” finally ended the long wait for gold, defeating Germany in a thrilling final in PyeongChang to return to the top of the podium for the first time in 26 years.

In total, Russian and Soviet teams have contested 17 Olympics under various flags, collecting nine gold medals, two silver and two bronze.

Coaching

The Team ROC coaching staff is headed by Alexei Zhamnov, with Sergei Gonchar, Alexei Kudashov and Sergei Fedorov as his assistants. All four are renowned players of the post-Soviet era but only Kudashov has significant experience as a head coach. He’s worked behind the bench at 380 KHL games, winning 228, and also had a short spell as head coach of the national team. Fedorov’s coaching career began this season at CSKA (47 games, 29 wins), Gonchar spent five years on the staff at Pittsburgh and Zhamnov took the helm at Spartak on an interim basis in 2018.

Since the end of his playing career, Zhamnov has focused more on management: he was GM at Vityaz, Atlant and Spartak. At the same time, he’s been involved with the national team since 2018, working at the last Olympics and three World Championships. He also has a close working relationship with Kudashov, a colleague at Atlant and later at two World Championships and the 2020 Euro Hockey Tour.

Leaders

Team captain Vadim Shipachyov is arguably the best center in Europe and, in addition to his own qualities, he brings the best out of his line-mates. It’s hard to find a player who can’t build a productive partnership with Shipachyov. At the previous Games, Vadim played just one game before he was a healthy scratch, but it’s not the case that over the past four years he has grown from a reserve into a top-class player. On the contrary, he’s always been a big player but after a lackluster start to the tournament in PyeongChang he did not get a second chance as Oleg Znarok decided not to risk changes in the decisive stages. This season, Vadim has a big lead in the KHL scoring race (67 points in 48 games) and is third four goals with 24 snipes. And, unless something unexpected happens, he has an excellent chance of adding another medal — this time as a key player on the team.

After an underwhelming season at Columbus, Mikhail Grigorenko came back to CSKA and is currently the leading goalscorer on the team with 18 tallies. He’s on course to set a personal record this season. The Army Men have rotated their roster this season, but of the eight lines that have five or more goals, only two did not involve Grigorenko. He’s been part of the team’s most productive combination (14 goals with Plotnikov and Slepyshev) and also worked effectively with Plotnikov and Wallmark (10 goals), Wallmark and Slepyshev (six), Kamenev and Okulov, Karnaukhov and Slepyshev, and Wallmark and Karnaukhov (five each).

Nikita Gusev was one of the biggest stars of the previous Games: his last-minute goal took the final into overtime before his assist set up Kirill Kaprizov’s golden goal. He finished as the tournament’s leading scorer and its best forward. Like Grigorenko, Gusev could not fully establish himself in the NHL but his return home is a big boost for the KHL and the national team. At SKA, Anton Burdasov and Andrei Kuzmenko — neither of whom are in the ROC party — have scored more, but both have played significantly more games this season.

Roster

It’s likely that Shipachyov will start alongside Gusev and Grigorenko in a potent strike force. They could easily prove to be the most effective combination in Beijing. It’s possible, though, that Gusev will drop to the second line to make way for Stanislav Galiyev, Shipachyov’s team-mate at Dynamo Moscow, a move that would hardly weaken the efficacy of the ROC’s top line.

Interestingly, although Shipachyov doesn’t really need familiar faces around him, his partnership with Galiyev might be the only current club pairing to reappear on the national team. Two other possible club connections, Sergei Plotnikov — Anton Slepyshev and Artyom Anisimov — Artur Kayumov, are doubtful: Plotnikov is in isolation and Anisimov is currently on the reserve list. CSKA’s Sergei Andronov and Pavel Karnaukhov rarely appear on the ice together, while at SKA Gusev doesn’t play with Kirill Marchenko and Avangard’s Arseny Gritsyuk and Kirill Semyonov are on different lines this season.

It’s a similar situation on defense. There are suggestions that Artyom Minulin will play alongside Yegor Yakovlev, but at Metallurg they are rarely paired. That said, the defense looks well balance. There’s a nice combination of experience from Slava Voynov and Yakovlev, both of whom were in PyeongChang, and youngsters Shakir Mukhamadullin, Alexander Nikishin and Sergei Telegin. And those who are ‘average’ by age are hardly ‘average’ players. The bulk of the workload in Beijing will likely fall on Nikita Nesterov (28), with Voynov and Yakovlev, with Alexander Yelesin (26) also a candidate for big minutes. It will be interesting to see how Nikishin progresses at a new level as he looks to continue his journey from bright prospect to established defenseman.

In goal, Ivan Fedotov is likely to get the starting role. At CSKA he is getting more games than Sweden’s Adam Reideborn, but isn’t quite the undoubted #1. Timur Bilyalov is more secure as the starter at Ak Bars, ironically after wresting that status away from Reideborn, but he’s regarded as the third choice on the national team. That’s mostly because SKA’s Alexander Samonov has more international experience than his colleagues. However, this season he has barely played: a couple of games around the turn of the year ended a spell of almost two months riding the pine. Samonov has made it onto the ice just nine times this season, and only completed five full games. Similarly, his numbers are relatively weak (although, on the flipside, he has ample motivation to prove his point). Fedotov and Bilyalov are statistically much stronger, even though they don’t feature among the top goalies in the league.

Prognosis

Team ROC’s biggest problems (in no particular order) are: an inexperienced head coach, the absence of several key forwards, uncertainty over the first choice goalie (and in Samonov’s case, a worrying lack of game time) and the extended ‘bubble’ which, again, robs players of game readiness.

The good news is that anything which looks like a problem from the outside can be: a) solved; b) not be critical; or c) not be a problem at all. After all, it’s easy to overlook the fact that everyone working inside this process is weighing up these issues and adapting to them accordingly. Sometimes, of course, it can work the other way if a serious problem emerges unexpectedly. But any list of pre-tournament problems is always more of an assumption than a statement of fact.

The other positive is that it is rare to see every possible problem explode in real life: usually, some worries are justified, some can be dealt with and some never materialize in the first place. In respect of Team ROC, it’s hard to imagine a series of explosions so great that they stop the team before the semi-finals. The Russians’ final position in the top four depends on which possible issues become real, and how well the team can cope. But it’s by no means a pipedream to hope for a second successive gold medal.