Season preview: Dinamo Minsk. Life after Kvartalnov

In its traditional feature, KHL.ru looks at the state of the League’s teams ahead of the new season. Dinamo Minsk suffered significant losses over the summer and are unlikely to challenge for a repeat of last year’s result.

Last season

Dinamo Minsk has played in the KHL since its inaugural season, spending long time hovering between the middle of the standings and the bottom of the table, and failing to make the playoffs on several occasions. Since 2021, however, the Belarusians have established themselves as a solid middle-of-the-pack team, finishing seventh or eighth in the regular season four years in a row. Then came another step forward: in spring 2025, they finished fourth and reached the second round of the Gagarin Cup playoffs for the first time in franchise history. After making targeted additions to their roster that summer, they were considered one of the contenders; not among the leading favorites, but a team capable of making a deep run.

They partly lived up to that status, finishing second in the Western Conference and fifth overall in the regular-season standings, before comfortably dispatching their Moscow namesakes in the first round, 4-0. In the next round, however, Dinamo were just as convincingly swept by Ak Bars, failing to win a single game in the four-game series.

That makes the assessment of last season a mixed one. On the one hand, they maintained the bar they had set a year earlier, while second place in the conference was the best regular-season finish in franchise history. On the other, Dinamo failed to take the next step that had been expected of them. One consolation may be the fact that both last year’s and the previous year’s Gagarin Cup campaigns ended against teams that would go on to reach the Finals.

Recruitment

Dinamo’s losses are substantial, both in absolute terms and compared with their additions. So it seems likely that their work on the transfer market is not yet finished.

Departures:

Defensemen: Darren Dietz (Sibir), Kristian Khenkel, Robert Hamilton (CSKA). Forwards: Yegor Borikov, Vadim Moroz (both Utah, NHL), Kirill Voronin (Sochi), Vyacheslav Gretsky, Vitaly Pinchuk (Nashville, NHL), Ryan Spooner, Andrei Stas (Ak Bars), Vadim Shipachyov (Salavat Yulaev).

Arrivals:

Defensemen: Jake Bischoff (Shanghai Dragons), Daniil Bokun (tryout, Lada), Dmitry Kuzmin (Rockford, AHL). Forwards: Rhett Gardner (CSKA, trade), Sergei Kalinin (CSKA), Maxim Maltsev (tryout, Lokomotiv), Nicolas Aube-Kubel (Iowa, AHL), Chris Tierney (HC Ambri-Piotta, Switzerland).

Top 3 signings

Chris Tierney is returning to Dinamo, having already played for the club two seasons ago, so he is familiar with both the KHL and Minsk specifically. In his first stint, he performed quite well, even if he wasn’t used in a leading role. Importantly, Chris not only handled his responsibilities on the ice but also played a major role in developing Yegor Borikov and Daniil Lipsky, who were both just 19 at the time and frequently played on his line.

Nicolas Aube-Kubel has nearly 350 NHL games under his belt, which represents significant experience despite his modest career numbers of 34 goals and 51 assists. He was a prolific scorer at the junior level and was drafted relatively high, in the second round. With every team he played for, including Minnesota, the Rangers, Buffalo, Washington, Toronto, Colorado, and Philadelphia, however, Nicolas was primarily an energy player who battled along the boards and pressured defensemen in the offensive zone, while his ice time rarely exceeded ten minutes per game. Even though Dinamo are not constrained by the KHL’s import limit, it seems unlikely they signed him for the same role. The 30-year-old Aube-Kubel will therefore have to rediscover his junior scoring touch in an unfamiliar league and country. Whether he can do that is impossible to predict; we’ll find out soon enough.

Sergei Kalinin is an experienced forward, although the peak of his career seems to be behind him. He played relatively little over the past two seasons and did not always find a new team right away. He initially joined Dinamo on a tryout contract as well, but successfully earned a full deal. Clearly, Minsk are looking for someone who can replace Andrei Stas, a similarly defense-oriented forward who also brings considerable authority to the locker room.

Coaching

We know Sergei Brylin the player very well, but know virtually nothing about Sergei Brylin the coach. That is, we’re familiar with his résumé, of course, but have no real idea about his tactical philosophy. For one thing, his entire coaching career has been spent in North America; for another, until recently he had always worked as an assistant and had never been a head coach. From 2013 to 2022, he worked with Albany, Binghamton, and Utica, the Devils’ AHL affiliates, and in 2022 he was promoted to New Jersey itself. This summer, amid the organization’s restructuring, Brylin was offered a move into a front-office role, but he chose to remain behind the bench and moved to Minsk.

There are two reasons for optimism: his 13 years of experience in the AHL and NHL, even if largely as an assistant, and the fact that in recent years, the vast majority of first-time KHL head coaches have performed better, or even significantly better, than expected.

There is also reason for skepticism, however: Dinamo Minsk’s internal politics, which claimed the architect of the club’s enormous progress, Dmitry Kvartalnov. During last season, his increasingly bitter conflict with general manager Oleg Antonenko even became public, which is unusual; after the season, Kvartalnov was not offered a new contract, ultimately leading to Brylin’s appointment. Dinamo also took quite a while to find a new head coach, suggesting they had no ready-made plan in case Kvartalnov left. Much, therefore, will depend on how well this outsider fits into the system—and whether the system supports him or puts obstacles in his way.

Goalies

Before last season began, the tandem of Zach Fucale and Vasily Demchenko was considered one of the strongest in the league. Both had inconsistent seasons, alternating good performances with mediocre ones; Fucale even posted the lowest save percentage of his entire KHL career during the regular season, at 90.9%. As a result, Dinamo’s goaltending unit has lost some of its previous standing, but it still remains above average.

Defense

At first glance, the defensive line has not lost all that much: Christian Khenkel was often the seventh defenseman, while Darren Dietz was useful in the offensive zone but not particularly reliable in his own end. He also had a tendency to take unnecessary penalties in critical situations, when, for example, the team needed to protect a narrow lead or erase a narrow deficit. Replacing Robert Hamilton, however, is genuinely difficult. By and large, losing just one of your four top defensemen is rarely a catastrophe, especially when players such as Ty Smith and Xavier Ouellet remain. But that’s precisely the problem in Minsk this summer: there is no adequate replacement not only for Hamilton, but for Dietz either — each of the three newcomers (one of whom is on a tryout contract) can only realistically compete for Henkel’s role.

And Nicolas Meloche’s injury in the final game of the Moscow Mayor’s Cup has only made the situation even more complicated.

Offense

The losses up front, meanwhile, are serious by anyone’s standards. That’s despite the fact that last season’s leading scorer remains, not just Dinamo’s, but the entire League’s, Sam Anas, who tied the KHL record with 89 points. Tierney and Aube-Kubel, along with the defensive-minded Kalinin and Rett Gardner, who scored just one (!) goal in 74 KHL games, in no way make up for the departures of Borikov, Vadim Moroz, Vadim Shipachyov, and especially Vitaly Pinchuk, who combined for 82 goals and 101 assists last season. Extending Alex Limoges was a success for Minsk, but there is no way to find a center like Pinchuk on the market, not for any amount of money, to play alongside Anas and Limoges. And although Vitaly was only Dinamo’s third-leading scorer behind Sam and Alex, it is highly unlikely that they will come close to last year’s numbers without him.

Perhaps Limoges will move to center himself, with Stanislav Galiev or, for example, Sergei Kuznetsov taking his place on the wing. But Dinamo also has no center for its second line, at least not one suitable for a team aiming for more than simply making the playoffs. Tierney is too much of a heavyweight for that role, Lipsky is not ready yet, while Ilya Usov is a forward of a somewhat different type. In short, the gap between the first line and the third, let alone the fourth, appears to be quite large, which puts a double burden on the team’s leaders.

Youngsters

Dinamo developed an unusually large group of talented players from the same generation within a relatively short period, with an age spread of just three to five years. It seems that bringing in Kvartalnov, who is not afraid to give young players opportunities and helps them develop, was no coincidence, and the plan worked brilliantly. Some of those players are no longer considered youngsters, while others have moved on, but Dinamo still has players capable of further growth. The hypothetical holes in the roster could provide excellent conditions for that development. The question, however, is whether that growth will happen without Kvartalnov.

The focus is primarily on the forwards: the aforementioned Lipsky, Nikolai Salygo, Bogdan Belkin, who has looked confident during the preseason, and Arseny Chukhrayev, who has yet to make his KHL debut.

Expectations

There is no way to expect a repeat of last year’s result: Dinamo’s offense has simply been depleted too severely. Moreover, regardless of Brylin’s tactical preferences, the team’s style of play will inevitably change to some degree, and such changes are never painless for successful teams that find themselves undergoing an unintended rebuild.

If everything falls into place, Minsk could challenge for fourth place in the conference (which would be a step backward compared with last season, but would still be a perfectly respectable result). For now, however, a return to the position they occupied four or five years ago seems more likely: making the playoffs as a lower seed and exiting in the first round.