MHL General Discussion - Part III

[SoundAndFury]

Any information on him would be appreciated. I might check out some Russian hockey threads for more insight.

I will quote my last year's post from Dmitri Nikolayev thread:

Nikita Lysenkov or Nikita Bogdanov are career VHL goalies and they had some spectacular seasons (we are talking .95+ Sv%) in the SKA system because their lower-level teams are that dominant (also VHL is THAT low-scoring). So almost any stat-related argument regarding SKA carries almost no value.

This applies to their MHL goalies as well and now one can add Nikolayev himself to the list of goalies who were hyped based on the stats that meant nothing. Examples are countless, be it MHL or the VHL.

Even within the system, Saranchuk seems to be rated more highly as he is the one getting VHL games and all their goalies have spectacular numbers. His lack of VHL games, for a 20-year-old, is a bit of a red flag.

 

[Michael Farkas]

Sorry to create a new thread, but I couldn't find a good place for this to go. The MHL was often criticized for the imbalanced schedule and some players were putting up crazy numbers against some prohibitively weak teams...also, some really off-putting things were happening (like the Chinese team from a few years back that basically lost all of their games, except for the time the Chinese players were away for national team duty, and a team of like 9 Russians won their only game of the year or something like that haha).

Recently, they split the MHL into Golden and Silver divisions. Any of the more staunch followers of Russian junior hockey here have any opinions on how that has gone?

It seems to me that the schedule is balanced in such a way that gold plays gold more and then when it comes to the playoffs, the top 3 silver teams in each division try to secure one spot in the gold playoffs (1-8)?

Any thoughts (or corrections to my impressions)?

 

[Caser]

Sorry to create a new thread, but I couldn't find a good place for this to go. The MHL was often criticized for the imbalanced schedule and some players were putting up crazy numbers against some prohibitively weak teams...also, some really off-putting things were happening (like the Chinese team from a few years back that basically lost all of their games, except for the time the Chinese players were away for national team duty, and a team of like 9 Russians won their only game of the year or something like that haha).

Recently, they split the MHL into Golden and Silver divisions. Any of the more staunch followers of Russian junior hockey here have any opinions on how that has gone?

It seems to me that the schedule is balanced in such a way that gold plays gold more and then when it comes to the playoffs, the top 3 silver teams in each division try to secure one spot in the gold playoffs (1-8)?

Any thoughts (or corrections to my impressions)?

Iirc, the schedule is that every team plays 4 times vs. their division's teams and 2 times vs. the other division's teams. And also probably should be noted that West divisions don't play vs. East at all (btw, in general probably it is fair to say that East is slightly yet weaker).

Not easy to evaluate it, as the reason for it was a doubtful (imo) willingness to expand and support that way the teams that want and need something more serious than the NMHL. So yes, obviously more games between stronger opponents is good both for these stronger teams and for the fans. However pretty much every season there are some teams that are just too strong for the Silver division yet have to spend the full regular season there due to relegation, which isn't too great for them, like the CSKA MHL team this year. Obviously noone else to blame there than themselves, but what I meant that in general the intention for the teams to stay in the Golden division at any cost might be a factor of less trusting the younger players in the future.