Canadian coach Bob Hartley will leave the club, the results of the season, what will happen to the team after returning to Omsk. Sport Express
Bob Hartley to step down as Avangard head coach
The results of the season for the team from Balashikha, preparing to return back to Omsk.
Made a delivery on the muscles and sizes
During four years of work in KHL Bob Hartley collect debug in “Vanguard” almost perfect system, which in three seasons led Omsk to the long-awaited Gagarin Cup. And it is hardly worth saying now that the Canadian releases the “hawks” defeated or on a minor note. Who in general, except for expert Alexander Kozhevnikov, after a sharp plot series with “Magnitogorsk”in connection with which he went because of the departure Ville Pocchi and Oliver Caskey had to play five backs, dare you throw a stone at him?
Someone will say that the Avangard general manager Alexey Volkov together with the francophone, after the golden season itself, they arranged for themselves the spring problems of an unobvious summer selection, and will be partly right. If they took the championship with creative links, then, losses in the offseason Klima Kostina, Rida Bush, Egor Chinakhov And Kirill Semenovfully confirmed the defense and made a delivery on muscle and size, as if believing that the Hartley system is determined by the performers, and not vice versa.
While the same Magnitogorsk residents became lighter, faster and more maneuverable, Omsk residents deliberately overgrown with meat and collected elite plowmen like Vladimir Zharkov, Ivan Telegin And Yaroslava Kosova, at the exit sifting in skill. Fundamentally not changed Nikolai Prokhorkin from Nikita Soshnikov. And here’s the unstoppable progress Arseny Gritsyukrevealed next to Korban Knight, became a real salvation for Omsk and more than compensated for the early departure to the NHL of Yegor Chinakhov.
Vanguard hockey players.
HC Avangard
But wait: was the championship tandem, having given the best result in the history of the Kahael club, the right to such a restructuring? Of course yes. Just as there was the right to an unsuccessful offer to Vladimir Bryukvin, after a year earlier he successfully became and inspired a new life in Sergei Tolchinsky. To doubt his actions to the main ideologist and patron of the new Avangard Alexander Krylov it was the same as not trusting Volkov and Hartley. Moreover, the attack had to be redrawn in a short time.
Largely due to the large number of new faces in the attack at the beginning of the minimum regularity, Avangard looked unattractively amorphous in creation. The problem was almost immediately identified by Hartley himself, who said that many beginners are dragging out the process of adapting to the Canadian’s game models. And by the way, how scrupulous he is about the smallest details and meticulously tries to explain the element during lengthy video debriefings, the September difficulties looked like a rarely banal debugging process, which was slightly delayed due to injuries of some attackers and the departure Peter Ceglarik for Olympic qualification.
I still remember how, at the pre-season tournament in Sochi, Bob kindly “expelled” journalists from the press center for a short while and chewed something for about 40 minutes Vladimir Zharkov. Long-term debriefing was par for the course with Hartley. As Alexey Potapov said, Bob managed to sort out not only games, but also training. Total immersion in the system.
With what will Avangard return to Omsk?
It was the system, which started working in the second half of the season, that helped the Siberians offset the shortage of performers. “Work multiplied by work”, “our Russian Gulag, army” – this is how hockey beans are described, who managed to work with him and feel an exceptionally special, but very experimental process from “a” to “z”.
His game model is high volume skating, strict task execution, many blocked shots, mandatory return play and active forechecking. Everything else is secondary. If you don’t plow every shift, you won’t survive. And after all, gamers do not choke him. Look at least at the examples of Bush, Tolchinsky, Chinakhov and Gritsyuk. Can you create and weave legs for defenders? Okay, but if you please wear the puck on a par with the armed forces. Not ready to work silently and do what is asked in the first place? Look for an exit from the arena and a new club like Sergey Shumakov. And as soon as the “best friend” of veterans of veterans loosened the screws a little with Magnitogorsk, Avangard turned into its own sample of September.
Bob Hartley (second from left).
Alexander Fedorov, Photo “SE”
And Bob doesn’t overlay himself with North American assistants, he delivers a gift to Omsk legends next to him. Dmitry Ryabykin And Anton Kuryanov, who successfully replaced Konstantin Shafranov, master of the majority, who left in St. Petersburg last summer. With him to Balashikha, Mr. Hartley brought only his closest associate Jacques Cloutier, who has been invariably working in conjunction with him since 1995, when the natives of Quebec trained in the AHL, and from the collaboration with Mike Pelino, he disappeared after the very first season.
But if Kuryanov, who managed to keep the productivity of the attacking special teams at the level of last year, worked out his debut season in the KHL, then Ryabykin methodically absorbed the knowledge and outlined the ideas of the Canadian guru for the last four years. And to whom, if not to him, the management of Avangard should have entrusted the compressor upon the return of the team to Omsk?
Now everything is going to the fact that due to a possible shortage of legionnaires, already in this off-season on the Kakhael market there is a slaughter for every more or less decent Russian hockey player. It is not yet clear how and by whom Avangard will compensate for the potential losses of Tolchinsky, Knight, Tseglarik and Semenov, which include the subject interest of CSKA. It is only clear that Omsk is far from attracting the Moscow region and it will be much more difficult to lure craftsmen to hospitable, but cold and provincial Siberia. And, probably, it is Hartley’s baggage that should help the Omsk residents survive the first season after the long-awaited repatriation.