Review of the Season: Vityaz. Five coaches in 367 days

KHL.ru kicks off its review of the 2023-2024 season with Vityaz. After the club’s best ever KHL season in 2022-2023, Vityaz was unable to build on that success and finished 2024 in last place.

Even back in pre-season, Vityaz looked like an outsider. The start of the championship confirmed those suspicions. In September, the Moscow Region club managed just two victories amid nine losses (eight of them coming in a row). By October Vityaz was the first club to replace its head coach. To some extent that switch brought improvements: it wasn’t that everything got better overnight, but there was some evidence of progress. At least there was no repeat of the prolonged September slump: future skids were limited to three or four games at a time. There was one exception in late November and early December when the team suffered six successive reverses, but even then getting to overtime in St. Petersburg (albeit in another defeat) saw Vityaz scramble up to 19^th in the overall standings.

But 19^th proved to be the high-water mark. From then until the end of January, Vityaz floated around between 20^th and 23^rd. In February, the team sank to the bottom for the last time, failing to recover and finishing two points adrift of Barys.

Best players

Scott Wilson
30 (20+10) points in 38 games

Injuries kept Wilson out of the team until mid-October and he then missed all of January. Ultimately, he played barely half of this season’s games. That was enough to pot 20 goals, and place third in goals-per-game behind Nikolai Goldobin and Reid Boucher. Considering that Vityaz lost 10 of the games Wilson missed by a single goal, it's not hard to conclude that if Scott had stayed healthy the battle for a playoff place might have been rather more serious.

Yegor Voronkov
12 (1+11) points in 67 games

Voronkov was the epitome of an unsung hero for Vityaz this season. He didn’t even crack the top 10 scorers on the team, but still emerged as one of the key players on the team. With Voronkov on the ice, Vityaz scored 42 goals in equal strength play, allowing 44. For comparison, the equivalent figures for top-scoring D-man Jeremy Roy were 35 and 61. Jeremy played more minutes (22:24), but Yegor’s 19:03 was the third best on his team.

Jeremy Roy
31 (4+27) points in 67 games

For his part, Roy was also a key player. He played more than anyone and, when he was on the ice he quarterbacked his team’s offense with 2,247 passes of which 82.82% were successful. Only five defensemen did more in the regular season and each of them ranked as a leader in one or another indicator. Roy regularly picked up points and was not far behind leading scorer Derek Barach. His accuracy maintained the same levels as last season, suggesting a rare degree of consistency. He didn’t shirk his defensive duties either, blocking more than 100 shots.

Coaching

For many teams, winning exactly 50% of games would be a disappointment, but for Vityaz the 2022-2023 campaign was the best ever in the KHL. Finishing sixth in the West was another all-time high and, for the first time, the team managed to win a game in the playoffs. However, the club could not agree a new contract with Vyacheslav Butsayev and instead entered the new season under Alexander Zavyalov. He lost 11 from 13 games and was dismissed after a 1-9 hammering against CSKA. Alexei Tertyshny took on an interim role for two games and earned three points with a win over Kunlun and an overtime loss to Barys. Then Dmitry Ryabykin got the job, and went on to win 13 games out of 53. At the end of the season, Ryabykin’s contact was not extended and Pavel Desyatkov moved from Lada’s coaching staff to step into the head coach role. He was officially appointed on May 2 and, including Tertyshny, Desyatkov became Vityaz’s fifth coach in 367 days.

Best game

Ryabykin’s spell at Vityaz began with four successive losses and an aggregate score of 4-19. That included a 1-8 reverse in Ufa and a 1-5 loss to Spartak. Game five was against Avangard, where Ryabykin played for many years and served as head coach for a short time in the previous season. That close connection may have given extra spice to the match-up, but for Vityaz the key thing was to fight the fire. After 20 minutes, down 0-2, the flames were still raging. Then came a rousing fightback: two goals apiece for Roy and Barach, three points for Wilson and eventually a 5-2 victory.

Youngsters

Stanislav Yarovoy, regarded as the brightest prospect at Vityaz, didn’t perform badly but did not really match expectations. However, from the very start of the season, Vityaz was never in a place where it could steadily introduce young players to the team. As a result, only Yaroslav Busygin enjoyed regular ice time, and he did a decent job with his opportunities.

Ivan Vorobyov , who arrived from Torpedo during the season, also made a positive impression. It took him about a month to settle in but then he began to shine. He picked up a rookie of the month award, something that nobody at the club had managed for 12 years.

Summer work

An obviously unsuccessful season usually prompts a radical overhaul. So far, though, Vityaz has not made any big moves. There’s a new head coach, Yegor Morozov arrives from Admiral (with Igor Ugolnikov going the other way); Wilson departed for Metallurg, but there’s no further news so far. Everything else relates to internal matters and contract extensions for existing players.