With days before teams report to Grand Fork, North Dakota, for the IIHF under-18 world championship, news broke out of Russia that a majority of the players on the inaugural Russian under-18 program team have tested positive for meldonium.
The coach of the team has been fired, and the entire team replaced by the 16-year-old group and elite 15-year-olds such as Andrei Svechnikov (brother of Detroit first-rounder Evgeni Svechnikov).
Why is this important?
This doping scandal, first reported by AllHockey.ru is significant not only because a major hockey country has to turn over its roster before an IIHF tournament but also because of what this Russian team was, exactly.
This is the first year of the new Russian under-18 program, which was meant to emulate USA Hockey's national team development program, which has been in operation since 1996. Other nations such as Slovakia have already tried to mimic the U.S. program, and this was the first year Russia had done so.
These programs are developed for three main reasons:
Hands-on development to improve the output of a country's hockey players.
Give players incentive to stay in-house and not go to other countries to develop.
To perform better in international tournaments.
In fact, for a country's under-18 program, the main IIHF tournament is often the shining star toward which the players work. Even the Russian players had been quoted earlier this week saying the team has prepared all year for this very tournament. Now, all that work, preparation and resources are out the window. It's been estimated that the Russians spent about 700 million Russian rubles on the under-18 program this year, which is more than $10 million in U.S. currency.
With the news that potential first-round pick German Rubtsov -- among other good prospects -- won't be coming overseas, it raises questions, some new and some familiar, about the future of these prospects.
The 'Russian Factor'
Before going further, it's important to have a good understanding as to what the often discussed "Russian Factor" actually is. It is used in blanket terms to describe the risks of Russians fleeing to the Kontinental Hockey League or not being able to bring them over to begin with. While the scare stories of Alexander Radulov and Alexander Perezhogin -- among others -- are at the forefront, the best players, for the most part, come over and stay.
I took data from 1990 to 2010 and sorted it by points per game by draft slot for Russians vs. non-Russians. Since sample size is an issue here, I included only draft slots for which each category was represented at least once.
Note: Points per game is on the Y-axis and draft slot on the X-axis. Non-Russian players are represented by the blue line, and Russians are represented by the red line.
I used points per game to illustrate a widely known metric; if you argue that this doesn't adjust for position, or total games played, rest assured that the discrepancies remain if you make those adjustments.
What I've found is that the "Russian Factor" exists in two worlds. This means the very best Russians don't tend to be much of an issue and are actually underdrafted by a margin of about 20 percent. Meanwhile, the group of players who aren't worthy of a top-50 pick tend to be overdrafted. This is actually a logical outcome. The bottom of the draft tends to be a team's depth players -- the guys who populate an AHL roster and provide relief for teams when injuries strike. Russians don't tend to be those guys. They don't tend to come over to be a "quad-A" player. There are a total of 11 Russian players who have played in the AHL this season, most of whom are on the younger side.
If you look at games per pick or what percentage of picks are Russians compared to non-Russians throughout the draft, this trend will emerge, as well, but the results are more striking when you look at how much production teams get from their Russian draft picks. The lesson with Russians is: Go for broke, or don't bother at all.
Impact on the under-18 team
With the above lessons in mind, let's turn to the current Russian under-18 team. I have little doubt that Rubtsov will still be valued highly on draft day. A quick poll of several NHL scouts saw almost no shift in opinion on the player given the news. He's been consistently impressive the past two years, including being one of the top players at the World Junior A Challenge in November in North America. I project he will be picked in the first round, or at the very lowest in the top 40.
After him, though, it gets tricky. The IIHF under-18 championship tends to be a tournament in which mid-tier prospects differentiate themselves and can elevate into that next group. Players such as Artur Kayumov, Ivan Kosorenkov, Nikita Makeyev, Alexander Yakovenko, Mikhail Berdin and Vladislav Sukhachyov have had good seasons, but not quite at Rubtsov's level. If you're an NHL team debating these kind of guys, you're thinking two things: (1) they haven't clearly put themselves in the conversation as potential top-60 picks, and (2) players who don't put themselves in a top-60 conversation from Russia tend to not come over, so why am I using one of my seven draft picks on them?
Ironically, one main goal of the Russian under-18 program was to prevent players from going overseas. It gave great development opportunities to provide incentives for Russian prospects not to go to the Canadian Hockey League. After these developments, if you're one of the top 15- or 16-year-old prospects in Russia, do you really trust this program with your hockey future? It will be very interesting to see how many Russians are picked in next year's CHL import draft after these developments.
Takeaways
At the end of the day, it is simply a tragic turn of events for a group of talented 17-year-olds who worked for a full season toward succeeding in the IIHF under-18 tournament next week. However, even with the sad stuff noted, the hockey players still need to be evaluated. This was a critical opportunity for many of them regarding their NHL draft stock, particularly the ones who haven't swayed the opinions of the scouting industry to date.
Nobody is really worried about the NHL potential of a top player such as Rubtsov or whether he will come over, but, for many of his comrades on the Russian under-18 team, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of NHL teams decide their draft picks are better spent elsewhere.