Mikhail Kravets: “Avangard turned out to be a game of untapped opportunities”

On Monday, September 11, Avangard at home lost to Amur in the KHL championship match. The score of the meeting is 1:5. The game was assessed by the head coach of the Hawks, Mikhail Kravets.

As the coach emphasized, it was difficult here, among other things, because of Reed Boucher’s injury (his tooth was knocked out). Without him, it was harder for the majority.

– It was clearly a game of unused opportunities. An excellent first period, in which the opponent almost didn’t reach our goal. We have eight minutes of the majority, although perhaps it could have been more, since we lost a player due to injury before the end of the match. Of course, in such a situation you need to punish the opponent for rudeness and score goals.

But at the same time, it was difficult to do this – the main player of the majority dropped out. Therefore, you can understand the guys that something didn’t work out somewhere. You don’t score – they score on you yourself. The third goal can probably be considered decisive, because they could have returned to the game before it. But everyone makes mistakes, the situation was difficult – the loss of two wingers at once. And, I think, all the same, the guys showed courage and character, and it’s just that almost everything went wrong for the opponent, and we had few chances that ended.

We need to move on, there are still two matches ahead at home against strong opponents.

– Previously, Anton Kuryanov was responsible for the majority in the headquarters. Who is currently working on this component? One trainer or several at once? And also, in a situation where the power play team lost Boucher, how difficult was it then to improvise when playing on the power play without him until the end of the match?

– Now Ramil Saifullin is responsible for the majority. In general, the entire headquarters is working on this component, but the specific responsibility is his, he leads it.

In principle, we played the first match of the season without Reed, so we didn’t have to come up with anything from scratch. We just went back to the combinations that were in that match. Otherwise, everyone saw for themselves that there were a lot of shots, there weren’t enough opportunities for expansion, and somewhere the goalkeeper wasn’t covered. It cannot be said that they acted incorrectly, there were many good moves, the puck reached the goal. She didn’t get pregnant here, we have to work, work on it.

– How would you rate the play of Reinhardt, who also replaced Boucher? On the one hand – an assist, on the other – then his mistake led to the third goal conceded…

– In Boucher’s place, Martynov played only in the majority. And Reinahardt played pretty well overall, but yes, in the episode you mentioned, he made a mistake when he returned the puck to the opponent. But the defender also had to back him up. And the goalkeeper.

– Amur’s first goals came from the spot. It seemed like we lost in this component today, do you see a problem with this?

– There is no problem here, out of 4 matches we have won 3 so far, today we lost, which means we need to watch the video, analyze what happened, and move on.

Previously we gave an estimate that Kravets gave the game against Barys.