Not Mukhamadullin's best moment, for certain.
But you have to admit, at least he's an interesting specimen. Russian KHL teams are not particularly known for giving kids his age big minutes, but that's the case with Mukhamadullin. Team Russia is not known for relying on less-than-stellar players to lead their team in ice time during the WJC, and yet here we are.
I've found myself defending Mukhamadullin all tourney long just because many of the people attacking him are the same people who overhype lesser defensemen in the tourney like Broberg and Ryan Johnson.
We can say a couple of very encouraging things about Mukhamadullin. His coaches seem to depend on him, he is capable of making high-end plays and passes, and -- although I'm not an analytics guy -- the metrics seem to be very much in his favor. Of course, you take this with the type of play you mentioned vs. Czech, where you can pull your hair out from its roots watching him.
I'm going to give Mukhamadullin the benefit of the doubt because of a few factors.
1)How much he has improved in one year.
At the outset of analyzing players for the 2020 draft, I had Mukhamadullin very, very high. At one point he was just outside my top 10 overall. I loved his combination of size & skill set. But I had to drop him like a bullet after an inconsistent 2019-20 campaign -- exactly what you're saying. In my preliminary draft rankings, I dropped Mukhamadullin to #42. In my final rankings, I had him as a 2nd/3rd round "tweener". All along I said he was an impossible guy to rank. But ranking is what I do, so I suppose I'm a jackass for bitching about it, ha.
2)Isn't inconsistency exactly the thing which improves with age and experience?
Mukhamadullin is certainly the type of player who makes a terrible play followed by a spectacular one, and vise versa. So he's frustrating to watch. He has a game like he did vs. Canada, where he was perhaps the best player on the ice. But then we have his game vs. Czech Republic, where he was very bad. Not Broberg Vs. Russia bad, but bad nevertheless. Hopefully experience teaches the kid to bring it every night, and to not get flustered by adversity. We shall see.
Last night, an old reader of mine in my Todays Slapshot days emailed me a very interesting question. He asked -- if the draft was held again today -- would I take Mukhamadullin at #20 overall. It's interesting to me because I've been his biggest defender all week long. But I must say, the answer is no. I'm going to stick by what I originally thought -- which was to draft one of my two highest ranked players, Perreault or Khusnutdinov. If I was pressured to take a defenseman, I would take my highest ranked D at that spot who was Brock Faber (though I would trade down first for Faber and try to get him in the late 20s).
This is not to say the Mukhamadullin pick bothers me. I've seen enough which encourages me to give the pick a few years. Although -- like you -- I also get frustrated. But, then I watch any shift by Dawson Mercer in the entire WJC tourney and I'm happy again, haha.
