Season review: Admiral. The end of Tambijev’s long-term project
KHL.ru continues its 2025-2026 season review with a trip to the Far East. Leonids Tambiejevs spent four years at Admiral’s helm, and parting ways with him midseason inevitably came at a cost for the team.
Admiral got off to a decent start, losing only twice in shootouts and once in regulation (0:1) through its first six games. By mid-October, however, the team had fallen into a slump. It managed to climb out of it by mid-November, collecting points in six straight games — with only two losses coming beyond regulation — and secured a place in the Eastern Conference playoff zone.
Another downturn followed, resulting in four consecutive defeats and the dismissal of head coach Leonids Tambijevs. To say the coaching change had a negative impact would be an understatement. Between December 17 and March 1, Admiral lost 23 of its 27 games and effectively threw in the towel. The club traded Daniil Gutik on unfavorable terms despite him having led Admiral in scoring in each of the previous three seasons and being well on his way to a fourth. The contract of Yegor Petukhov, a valuable presence both on the ice and in the locker room, was terminated, allowing him to join HC Sochi without compensation.
Admiral has endured its share of difficult seasons throughout its relatively short history, but this one was objectively the worst. Technically, the team won even fewer games in 2021-2022 (15 compared to 20 this season), but that regular season was shortened by the pandemic, and the winning percentage was still slightly higher than this year's — 30.61% versus 29.41%.
One additional statistic sums up the season perfectly: none of Admiral’s twenty victories were come-from-behind wins. Even HC Sochi and Lada, both of whom finished below Admiral in the standings with fewer points, managed to rally from deficits of two goals or more at various points during the season.
Best Players
14+29 in 68 games
Sulak began the season as Admiral’s captain before handing the “C” to Pavel Koledov. When Koledov was later traded to SKA, Sulak remained an alternate captain, wearing the “A” for the rest of the campaign.
Regardless of the letter on his jersey, Sulak was the team's cornerstone player and finished as its leading scorer despite being a defenseman. He also led Admiral in blocked shots with 106, played a key role on both the power play and penalty kill, and finished the season with an even plus-minus rating. That is a respectable achievement for a team that scored 161 goals while allowing 209.
0+16 in 64 games
Among Admiral defensemen, Solyannikov ranked second in scoring behind only Sulak. He also finished second on the team in average ice time (19:47 per game) and blocked shots (96), trailing only his fellow blueliner in both categories.
21+10 in 66 games
Admiral’s summer signing of Olson, who was relatively unknown in Russia, was met with caution, if not outright skepticism. The Canadian quickly proved during the preseason that his scoring touch was not limited to the Slovak league, where he had finished as the second-leading goal scorer.
His consistency dipped at times during the season, with three fairly lengthy scoring droughts affecting his numbers. Even so, 21 goals in a debut KHL campaign are a very respectable return.
Coaching
It is not often that a team’s identity — or, if you prefer, its public face — is defined not by a player but by its head coach. Tambijevs was one of those rare cases, and Admiral over the past four years was very much his personal project. Removing the architect in the middle of the season rather than at its conclusion always had minimal chances of producing a positive outcome, regardless of who was brought in as a replacement.
The unenviable task of taking over someone else’s project midseason — and then losing the team’s leading scorer as well — fell to Oleg Bratash. Two years earlier, he had engineered one of the biggest surprises in the league with Lada, only to be dismissed despite the team’s success.
Bratash himself admitted in April that, when he accepted the job in December, he had not anticipated the number of issues he would have to deal with. He was unable to solve them, but under those circumstances it is hard to imagine anyone else faring much better.
Contrary to the widespread belief that Bratash was merely a temporary solution, Admiral’s management opted against continuing its search for another head coach. As a result, he will now have the opportunity to reshape the team from the ground up, starting with preseason preparations.
Best Game
Admiral enjoyed a favorable schedule down the stretch of the regular season, facing seven consecutive opponents that either failed to qualify for the playoffs or were later eliminated in the first round. The stretch began with a game against Neftekhimik, in which the Far Eastern side scored seven goals — the first and only time it reached that mark all season.
Ironically, it was on that very day that Admiral lost even its mathematical chance of reaching the playoffs. Two and a half hours later, Sibir defeated the Shanghai Dragons, making the Novosibirsk club unreachable in the standings.
Young Players
Admiral entered the season with virtually no young players in its regular lineup. Nineteen-year-old defenseman Anton Shkolny was not considered a full-time roster option. Tambijevs included him in the lineup eight times, but Shkolny saw only limited action — two shifts in one game and four in another — while spending the remaining six contests as a healthy scratch.
During the season, Admiral added Oskar Bulavchuk from Sibir, Semyon Ibragimov from Sochi, Artyom Kudashov from Dynamo Moscow via Neftekhimik, and Maxim Maltsev from the Lokomotiv system.
Among them, Ibragimov saw the most action, appearing in 13 games with an average ice time of around 15 minutes, which climbed above 18 minutes toward the end of the season. He did not record a point but, like Sulak, finished with an even plus-minus rating.
Kudashov played the fewest games of the group, yet still ranked second among Admiral’s young players in scoring with one goal and two assists. The top scorer among the youngsters was Bulavchuk, who collected 4+1.
Offseason work
Strictly speaking, Admiral’s rebuilding process began before Tambijevs’ dismissal. The first step came last summer, when Vadim Averkin replaced Pavel Zhitkov as a general manager. It appears that the process may have effectively ended with the departures of Gutik, Petukhov, and Koledov.
At the moment, there are few signs of a major roster overhaul. Twenty players remain under contract, while three others are restricted free agents. None of the club’s nine unrestricted free agents has signed elsewhere so far, leaving the door open for some of them to return.
At the same time, Admiral has already been active in the opening days of the market. The club has added defensemen Grigory Vashchenko, Mikhail Gordeyev, Konstantin Luchevnikov, Roman Manukhov, and Ilya Morozov, along with forwards Pavel Kulikov, Maxim Musorov, Dmitry Mukhtarov, Artyom Pimenov, Ostap Safin, and Alexander Tochilkin.
That said, four of those newcomers have joined on tryout contracts.
