Avangard was ahead with resignation – Newspaper Kommersant No. 188 (7389) dated 10/11/2022

The first club in the Continental Hockey League, which this season decided to part with the head coach, was the failed start of the regular championship Avangard. He dismissed Dmitry Ryabykin, who worked as a mentor for only a few months after the Omsk team parted ways with Canadian Bob Hartley, one of the most prominent specialists in the KHL at the turn of the past and current decades.

The first coaching resignation in the KHL took place almost a month and a half after the start of the next regular season in a club that is part of a rather narrow group of unconditional domestic hockey giants. Avangard announced that it had decided to “finish cooperation” with Dmitry Ryabykin.

In fact, this step is from the category of those in which you will not find anything strange and controversial. Avangard, a club with solid financial and personnel capabilities by the standards of the KHL, failed at the beginning of the season. In 16 games he has played so far, he has won only six victories. And among his defeats – a few very painful, with a difference of three or more goals. He suffered the most recent on Sunday against the modest Kunlun with a score of 0:4 at the home arena, where he returned in October after a four-year break (the protracted reconstruction of the Omsk stadium forced the team to host rivals in Balashikha near Moscow). In the Eastern Conference, with 13 points, Avangard is now eighth, that is, in the basement of the “play-off zone”, but in the league’s summary table it is 18th. Only four clubs have worse performance – Neftekhimik, Amur, Traktor and Sochi.

At the same time, there were no good reasons to predict such a sharp decline in the summer, if we only mean the power of the squad.

Avangard suffered losses – we are talking, for example, about the Czech goalkeeper Shimon Grubets, who left the KHL. But he retained the backbone of the team that in recent years has almost always been on the shortlist of contenders for the Gagarin Cup: such great players as Reed Boucher and Korban Knight, Arseniy Gritsyuk and Nail took to the ice in September and October at Avangard Yakupov, Alexey Bereglazov and Artem Belov, Vladimir Tkachev and Sergey Tolchinsky. In the situation in which the Omsk club found itself, in fact, the only logical explanation for the collapse could only be the effectiveness of the key person in terms of managing this staff.

Dmitry Ryabykin as Avangard’s mentor got in the spring, after Bob Hartley announced that he was leaving due to “a desire to spend more time with his family.” Canadian specialist, who had extensive experience in the NHL, headed Omsk team in 2018 and turned out to be an extremely successful find for them. “Vanguard” before his appearance could not achieve a real breakthrough in the KHL. With Bob Hartley, he immediately reached the final in the playoffs, in which, however, almost without a fight, he lost dry to CSKA.

The next season turned out to be unsuccessful for Avangard. In the spring of 2020, the KHL was forced to suspend the cup stage before the second round due to the coronavirus pandemic. But by that time the club managed to retire from the race, losing to Salavat Yulaev. Bob Hartley, however, retained his post and was rehabilitated for a misfire a year later. Avangard again reached the final series and again met with CSKA. Only now he has taken over the opponent who was considered the favorite in six matches. Repeat the success of the “Avant-garde” did not work. In the previous season, he looked rather modest in the regular season, and in the playoffs, overcoming Ak Bars, in the second round, was cut off by Metallurg in a confrontation that stretched to the maximum (seven matches) distance. However, that loss could, at least in part, be explained by circumstances too unfortunate for the club. And so, having lost several core hockey players in the off-season, on the eve of the Gagarin Cup, against the backdrop of a special Russian military operation in Ukraine, he lost Ville Pokka and Oliver Kaska – two Finnish defenders who largely determined his game. Dmitry Ryabykin had no references to such circumstances at hand.

“Vanguard” has already announced that Mikhail Kravets will lead the team in his place as acting head coach.

He was included in the coaching staff of the Omsk club in September, as if preparing for promotion: by that time it was already obvious that the club was going through a crisis. His background speaks in favor of Mikhail Kravets. He has been training for more than ten years, however, it was as a mentor that he had the opportunity to work only with two not too ambitious KHL clubs – Vityaz and Amur. And when announcing his appearance in Avangard, Omsk general manager Alexei Volkov noted that Kravets “knows how to give the game a system, and is also able to demand that the players complete the coaching task – and knows how to ask for it.”

Alexey Dospekhov