Why the Sabres have taken a deliberate approach to taking Russian players in the NHL Draft

[Buddy]

Why the Sabres have taken a deliberate approach to taking Russian players in the NHL Draft

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[HipKat]

It’s been more than 30 years since the Buffalo Sabres made history by effectively convincing Alexander Mogilny to defect from the Soviet Union and facilitating his asylum status in the United States. He became the first Soviet player to defect to play in the NHL, paving the way for some of the sport’s biggest stars to do the same in the years that followed.

Getting Mogilny into a Sabres uniform started with then-general manager Gerry Meehan and director of player personnel Don Luce traveling to Stockholm, Sweden to pick Mogilny up from the World Championships and help him shake loose from the Soviet Union.

Nellie Drew was one of the attorneys helping the Sabres get asylum status for Mogilny and the details of it all are still seared in her memory.

“It was like a spy movie,” said Drew, who now works as a professor at the University at Buffalo. “It was absolutely crazy. There was a 24 or 36-hour period where I learned everything I possibly could about asylum law. Don and Gerry were driving around the streets of Stockholm trying to avoid the KGB. I was afraid for their safety.”

Mogilny, Luce and Meehan all made it over safely, and Mogliny went on to have 444 points in 381 games with the Sabres. Now 34 years later, the Sabres are in the midst of a two-year stretch in which they’ve had an unprecedented run of drafting Russian-born players.

When Kevyn Adams took over as general manager of the Sabres, the franchise had drafted just one Russian-born player in the previous six drafts. That pick was seventh-rounder Vasil Glotov in 2016. In the 10 drafts before that, the Sabres took just three Russians. Prior to Adams’ tenure, the franchise hadn’t had a draft with multiple Russian picks since 2002.

The team’s philosophy shifted in 2021 when it drafted four Russians, including two in the second round and one in the third round. The next year, Adams drafted two more Russians, one in the third round and one in the fifth round. That was intentional.

“I didn’t want us to dismiss or discount the amount of talent coming from Russia, the amount of hockey players that come over here and are successful,” Adams said. “That was something we spent a lot of time talking about.”

PLAYER	YEAR DRAFTED	ROUND DRAFTED
Viktor Neuchev	2022	3
Vsevelod Komarov	2022	5
Prokhor Poltapov	2021	2
Aleksandr Kisakov	2021	2
Stiven Sardarian	2021	3
Nikita Novikov	2021	6
Vasil Glotov	2016	7
Nikita Zadorov	2013	1
Mikhail Grigorenko	2012	1
Vyacheslav Buravchikov	2005	6
Denis Yezhov	2003	4
Pavel Voroshnin	2003	6
Maxim Shchevyov	2002	6
Artyom Kryukov	2000	1
Denis Denisov	2000	5
Vasili Bizyayev	2000	7
Dmitri Kalinin	1998	1
Maxim Afinogenov	1997	3
Alexei Tezikov	1996	5
Denis Tsygurov	1993	2
Sergei Petrenko	1993	7
Yuri Khmylyov	1992	5
Mikhail Volkov	1991	11
Viktor Gordiyuk	1990	7
Alexander Mogilny	1988	5

Drafting Russian players has always come with complicated questions. The first is, can you convince them to sign and come play in North America? That’s not always a guarantee with the KHL providing those players a legitimate alternative. Unlike players from North America or European countries, Russian players are often under contract with teams in their home country, extending the timeline on which they can be expected to get to the NHL and make an impact. There is no transfer agreement between the KHL and NHL the way there is with other leagues, so teams cannot simply buy out the contract of a Russian player.

These players also have to consider the political ramifications of leaving their home country. While it may seem like the high-wire act of Mogilny’s defection happened in another lifetime, Drew doesn’t think players now have it much easier when deciding whether to leave.

“These guys are caught between a rock and a hard place,” Drew said. “That dynamic has not changed in almost 40 years. Any given day, the stress level, the tension goes up or down a bit and that impacts the extent to which, I mean, these players may or may not be available and or willing to come.”

Then last draft cycle there was the question of Russia’s war with Ukraine, which further threw into question whether players would be willing or able to come to North America.

“We talked about it every day,” Adams said. “We can’t be blind to what’s going on in the world. But when you’re realistically timelining this, it could be anywhere from a year to five years. You don’t know. Who knows what the world is going to look like?”

Adams also had two luxuries not every other general manager does. Ownership afforded him time to rebuild with a patient, draft-and-develop approach. The Sabres also had 22 picks in the last two drafts, giving them more flexibility to take risks on the aforementioned unknowns with Russian players.

But this has been far from a dart-throwing exercise for Adams and his staff. It’s a shift in their thinking when it comes to drafting and developing players, one that has required organizational buy-in from ownership down through the player development staff. It has required input from vice president of hockey strategy and research Sam Ventura as well as some heavy lifting from the team’s Russian scout, Ruslan Pechonkin.

This process has been two years in the making and hasn’t yet yielded results at the NHL level. But while other NHL general managers have avoided drafting Russians altogether, Adams has taken a calculated approach to re-establishing a Russian pipeline in the prospect system.

“You have to have a plan,” Adams said. “You can’t just call a player’s name and hope it works out.”

When Adams was first building out the team’s draft strategy, he informed his staff that he wanted them to start by simply drilling deep into a player’s ability on the ice. He wanted, as much as possible, for his scout’s to remove any thinking about where a player is from. When it came time to finalize the draft board, that’s when Adams and his staff would discuss the league a player is playing in and where they were from. What is their contract status? What, if anything, has the team been able to learn about a player’s willingness to come to North America? From there, the team weighs at what spot in the draft it would be comfortable with the built-in risks.

“There’s no perfect science to it,” Adams said.

Ventura and Pechonkin have been two key pieces in this equation. Adams said it’s not a coincidence that the Sabres drafted four Russians in the first draft in which Ventura was employed by the team.

“That was very influential in that draft because there was good data in those leagues,” Adams said. “You could really get a good profile of the players. Obviously specifically the KHL, that’s a good hockey league. Sam was able to get data that maybe previous years you might not have had as much of. It did help paint the whole picture.”

Still, it’s a balancing act. As one example, Sabres director of amateur scouting Jerry Forton noted that the analytics department had a first-round grade on Viktor Neuchev, who the Sabres drafted in the third round of the 2022 NHL Draft. That was the spot where the value outweighed the risk.

“That’s why you have to do so much work before,” Adams said. “You can’t make those kinds of decisions or have those conversations on the draft floor. You have to, as a staff, with ownership, sit down and say, ‘Let’s play this out. Here’s where we see this player. If we got to here and it was this pick, are we comfortable?’ You’re taking some of the emotion out of it.”

Pechonkin, meanwhile, has essentially served as a hybrid staff member who both scouts and assists in player development. Typically, once a player is drafted, Forton and the scouting staff hand them off to Adam Mair and the player development group. With the Russians, it hasn’t been as simple. Pechonkin is helping with the background on a player to help determine what their specific situation is with their Russian club, how open they might be to coming to North America, what their personality is like and other information that would be hard to gather without being in Russia and speaking the language.

Once the player is drafted, Pechonkin is also able to serve as a translator for the development staff and front office. He can jump on a video call with Adams and the player to help translate the team’s message.

“It’s so important because these are players who aren’t able to be here during development camp,” Adams said. “Other players you draft, they come into the city and see the locker room and understand. Translator, player development, he’s done everything.”

Status of Sabres Russian Prospects

PLAYER	YEAR DRAFTED	ROUND DRAFTED	MOST RECENT LEAGUE	CONTRACT STATUS
Viktor Neuchev	2022	3	KHL	Signed with Sabres
Vsevelod Komarov	2022	5	QMJHL	Not signed
Prokhor Poltapov	2021	2	KHL	KHL contract through 2023-24
Aleksandr Kisakov	2021	2	AHL	Signed with Sabres
Stiven Sardarian	2021	3	NCAA	Not signed
Nikita Novikov	2021	6	KHL	Expired KHL contract

Russians still make up less than five percent of the NHL. But every summer, the conversation about what to do about the Russian prospects will continue across the league. Adams feels if the Sabres have the scouting knowledge and development infrastructure in place, they can enter each draft with conviction about the players and what their paths to the NHL could look like.

“They’re drafting well,” said Seth Appert, who coaches the Sabres’ AHL affiliate in Rochester. “I think there’s an emphasis on intelligence and skill. There’s a lot of Russian players that have that. If you’re going to cross out that section of the market, you’re potentially missing out on a lot of very intelligent, highly skilled hockey players. It makes sense to have those players in consideration to be drafted.”

So far, four of the six Russian players the Sabres drafted are either playing in North America or have signed entry-level deals with the Sabres. Aleksandr Kisakov was the first one who joined the organization playing for the Rochester Americans this season. Neuchev recently signed his entry-level contract and will be the next to join him. Drew thinks the way Adams and the Sabres have added multiple Russian players rather than just taking an isolated player is the wise move.

“If you’re going to do it and you’re to buy in and invest all that energy and capital, you might as well get more than one and try to help them develop some community,” Drew said.

That becomes important when it comes to the next stage of Buffalo’s plan, which is developing these talented draft picks into NHL players. Often, that can be much more complicated than the scouting piece.

“We’re not doing our job or we’re doing a disservice to our organization if we’re ruling players out just because of where they’re from.’” Adams said. “Let’s do the work. Then let’s do everything we can if we make the decisions to draft these players to help them.”