Picked 61st overall in the 2018 NHL Entry Draft, Ivan Morozov is regarded by many as the Las Vegas Golden Knights’ second best prospect behind Peyton Krebs.
He’s has had exceptional development up to the beginning of this season. He played 2nd line center all of last year with KHL club SKA St. Petersburg as a 20 year old. He posted 55GP 13G 18A 31pts. It’s extremely rare to see a player in the KHL have that much success so early in his career.
From watching him play, you see a player with some serious wheels. He has good finishing ability and is deceptively crafty with his stick when trying to gain possession. He doesn’t throw many hits, but he is great at closing the distance on the forecheck in order to knock the puck off possession and force a restart to the breakout.
He’s accomplished quite a bit since being drafted. So it was quite the surprise when @NHLJackManning on twitter posted a translated article from a prominent Russian sports outlet (sport24.ru) that
Ivan had been removed from the Olympic short list, demoted to Russia’s equivalent of the AHL, and put on the trade block as a one year rental — all over one bad shift.
For the sake of brevity: I will only include what is important to Ivan’s situation. I will break down the claims against him after the quote, so scroll past it if you don’t feel like reading the excerpt.
Ahead of Ivan was the debut world championship. It seems that something broke there.
Today, when Morozov plays in the VHL for SKA-Neva, this link is explained by the reduced requirements on the part of the player himself. Allegedly, the talented center-forward began to train worse, does not give all the best. Rotenberg explains this by some family and personal reasons. At the same time, he does not deny that the army team can exchange the striker. The only thing left to do is to wait for a favorable offer for the club. But what if the cause of the strange metamorphosis is worth looking for in Riga?
More precisely, in overtime of the quarterfinals of the World Cup against Canada. A lot has already been said about the moment when the "maple" ones turned out to be stronger in the game "three on three". And the fact that we in Russia do not work out this situation, unlike the founders of hockey. And the fact that it was not necessary to hold out until this very overtime. But who was on the set at that moment? The star of "St. Louis" Vladimir Tarasenko, absent for a season in the NHL Nikita Nesterov and, in fact, Morozov. The SKA forward first lost to the Canadian with his feet, and then he was easily defeated by another opponent.
“Ivan Morozov lost that throw-in in overtime when we were scored, and he was supposed to be replaced by Voronkov, but he did not,” Roman Rotenberg lamented after that match.
Was it really one single shift, albeit a really lousy one, that made the chief of staff put an end to Morozov? But until recently, he quoted this guy very highly and absolutely seriously considered him as a candidate for a trip to Beijing. And not only if the NHL refuses to release its players. Considering the catastrophic situation with the centers in the country, even the Olympics with the participation of all the strongest would have to take one, two, and maybe even three center-forwards from our league. And Morozov in this hierarchy followed Vadim Shipachev.
As far as we know, claims against Morozov began in the early stages of the preseason. He got pretty bad from the coaching staff at the tournament in Sochi. And Ivan was exiled to the farm club directly from the Champions Cup. It is interesting that this happened right after the match with Salavat Yulaev, in which the central striker scored a goal. But in fairness, we note that in addition to the abandoned puck, Morozov brought one puck to his own goal. Apparently, this was the last straw. Since then, the potential Olympian has not played for the SKA first team.
All this time there were rumors about where Morozov might go. Despite the striker's bilateral contract, SKA is unlikely to be playing him at HSE all season. According to various sources, CSKA and Ak Bars were interested in Ivan. From the Muscovites, Petersburgers allegedly asked Pavel Karnaukhov, another center of the Russian national team from the last World Cup, and from Kazan the right to Evgeny Svechnikov, who does not lose hope of gaining a foothold in the NHL. Now the most probable is the exchange of Morozov at Ak Bars for monetary compensation.
The catch is that Morozov's contract ends on April 30, 2022, after which he intends to leave for the NHL, where the striker is drafted by Vegas. SKA understands this, and potential buyers should also keep this in mind. It is possible that this very intention of Ivan is the real reason why he suddenly fell into disgrace. But what if his desire is not “to leave for the NHL”, but “to leave SKA”? Then the club that got Morozov has every chance to agree with him on the extension of the contract and get a really cool center, which in Russia can be counted on one hand. But in any case, Ivan has already lost his ticket to the Olympics
At face value, which it should not be taken at, the piece lays out a situation where Morozov showed up to camp out of shape after a bad shift to conclude the Russian Olympic Committee’s run at the IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship. The Vice President and General Manager of his club team (as well as ROC GM for the World Championship) completely threw this 21 year old under the bus to the media. It’s not surprising an article like this would come out further discrediting Morozov.
Before proceeding we need to celebrate the translation that led to Russians referring to Canadians as “the maple ones”. I’ll be using that from now on.
Fun aside, I decided to fact check what I could of Roman Rotenburg’s claims. It’s hard to dispute claims such as Ivan’s poor shape in training camp because the organization could easily manipulate that information made public if there is any at all. For what it’s worth, Morozov is rolling over the VHL with a stat line of 5GP 1G 5A 6pts. What we can check are his claims about Morozov’s tournament-ending shift of 3-on-3.
For legal reasons I cannot post images from the IIHF World Championship, which is a shame because I had quite the slide show prepared. Anyway here is how his shift went:
1. Play begins with Morozov starting his shift in the offensive zone. He loses the face-off leading to the Maple Ones getting possession.
2. Ivan gets caught going the wrong direction; putting himself in a position to lose a foot race to the puck holder.
3. He gets walked to the outside. In 3-on-3 it’s more of a F1, F2, F3 situation as opposed to a center, winger, defenceman layout. Morozov loses his guy and instead of cycling coverage he stays with him trying to catch up.
4. Morozov is scrambling to cover someone. With 3 Maple Ones down low, he pinches to the slot— essentially removing himself from the play.
5. Goal.
It was indeed a bad shift. The breakdown of what went wrong seems mostly accurate on Rotenburg’s part.
Except for the claim that Morozov failed to switch off. While I don’t have the rights to the video footage, I went through the game myself. His shift was 23 seconds. Why any team executive would lie about something like that raises a few questions.
Now there is a chance that:
he was supposed to be replaced by Voronkov, but he did not.
is merely a translation error. That said, “but he did not” certainly puts the responsibility at Morozov’s feet.
It is unclear what really went down to get this kid in such bad graces with his club. No executive and role model should be raking a prospect over the coals like Rotenburg did to Ivan Morozov. Perhaps further details will come to light when he gets to North America, but for now we can only deduct that the Russian Olympic Committee is extremely unforgiving when a player makes a mistake on the international stage.
I will update Morozov’s situation as the season progresses, but I think it’s pretty fair to say Ivan is looking forward to playing in North America. As I write this Morozov is a healthy scratch as his VHL team fails to come back from a 3-0 deficit. One can only assume a deal for his KHL rights is imminent.
Thanks for reading,
Trevor Neufeld
Credit to @NHLJackManning for unearthing this article as well as providing the translation.
Credit to Dima Erykalov at sports24.ru for the original article.
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