Didn’t make it to the finals.
For Coach’s Day, which was celebrated on October 30, Match TV journalist Pavel Lysenkov studied the statistics and found out: turns out, Roman Rotenberg – third in history KHL by percentage of points scored.
Left behind were the titled Oleg Znarok, Zinetula Bilyaletdinov and Ilya Vorobyov, the experienced Dmitry Kvartalnov, Andrey Razin and even Vladimir Krikunov. He was ahead of only Igor Nikitin and Vyacheslav Bykov, who won two Gagarin Cups each.
“The average statistics are facts, and we can only be proud of this,” Roman commented on local success in an interview with Match TV.
Rothenberg the coach has few other reasons to be proud. Apart from the Continental Cup for winning the regular season, he had no titles, despite the club’s solid financial capabilities.
Where do these numbers come from?
Rotenberg worked as chief for only a short time and only in a top club
We calculated the percentage of points scored in the regular season for all KHL head coaches who spent at least three seasons in the leagueand collected the data in a table. There was no place in the top ten, for example, for Andrei Razin, whose Magnitogorsk won the Gagarin Cup two years ago and is dominating the regular season this season. He has “only” 57 percent, but this characterizes not so much the level of the coach as the long and thorny path that he went through before ending up in the top team.
Roman’s only club is SKA, which he headed in January 2022. He never built a team from scratch, did not take on an average team in a crisis, and did not coach an outsider, like Dmitry Kvartalnov at Severstal or Razin at Admiral and Ugra. His starting point was already higher than that of most of his colleagues, and this affected the results.
In the 2021/22 regular season, Roman played only four matches in the main role (victories over Sochi, Kunlun and Torpedo, defeat against Ak Bars), and then the championship went on pause due to the pandemic and the Olympics. SKA fully became Rotenberg’s team in the summer of 2022, when he changed the roster to suit himself and held a preseason. In the first match of the 2022/23 regular season, 13 newcomers appeared, who were not in the last playoff game.
The army team won the first regular season under Rotenberg’s leadership by a huge margin. True, by the sixth match of the semi-finals of the 2023 Gagarin Cup, in which the coach’s debut season at SKA ended, there were 9 more new hockey players on the team compared to the beginning of the championship. Roman’s love for reshaping the roster has long been known to everyone – and this is one of the factors that prevented SKA from maintaining the pace that the team set initially. Each subsequent season of Rotenberg in SKA was worse than the previous one, and the constant turnover of players is one of the reasons.
The results worsened not only in the championship, but also in the playoffs. Every season SKA announced plans for the championship and spent money on expensive players, but moved further and further away from the Cup. In the spring of 2022, the army team was one victory away from reaching the finals. Three years later, they were eliminated in the first round, and if you remember their game in the regular season, you can’t call it an accident.
When changing a team, it is important not to break it – and this is exactly what happened with SKA Rotenberg. A hockey club is not the ship of Theseus, where you can replace rotten boards with new ones and maintain their presentation. Teamwork, the atmosphere in the locker room, and many other factors are important. When a hockey player came to SKA and could not be sure that he would finish at least the next season in St. Petersburg, what kind of team chemistry can we talk about?
We will never know what SKA would have achieved with Rotenberg this season. But Roman’s management style and the dynamics of the results hint that the percentage of points scored would have dropped lower.
Rotenberg is not even among the top five SKA coaches in the KHL
Looking into the history of SKA before Rotenberg the coach, it is easy to see that many of his predecessors did a better job of collecting points in the regular championships. Oleg Znarok scored 79.9% and won the Cup in 2017. Ilya Vorobyov, who replaced him, had 83.1% in the 18/19 regular season, but he was not forgiven for his defeat in the seventh game of the conference finals from CSKA. Alexey Kudashov is generally a statistical unique: 75.8% in the championship and not a single defeat in the playoffs (4-0 in the series with Vityaz, 100% victories). Therefore, the words “left of his own free will” in the club press release looked strange.
The “minimum three seasons” rule is not taken into account in this table. No one except Roman managed to work for SKA for so long in the KHL. Only Znarok and Barry Smith lasted two full seasons.
Even Valery Bragin’s two incomplete regular seasons at SKA – with all the incomprehensible movement that took place around his appointment and work at the club – had a total percentage higher than Rotenberg’s (70.7%). Finn Jalonen (69.7%) and Czech Milos Riga (70.3%) also had good numbers, but they did not have an additional season after failures in the playoffs. In the 2014/15 season, Vyacheslav Bykov had the same percentage of points scored in the regular season (68.3) as Roman, but this was followed by a strong playoffs with a victory in the Gagarin Cup.
Why are there so many strong coaches below Rotenberg? Is this fair?
Each case is individual in its own way and has justifications. The fourth line in the table is occupied by Bob Hartley. He is spending his fourth season in the KHL – from 2018 to 2021, the Canadian headed Avangard, and now works at Lokomotiv. Before his arrival in Omsk, the club was shaky: the “hawks” barely made it into the playoffs, just one point ahead of “Sibir”. Then Avangard barely crossed the mark of 50% of points scored – 88 in 56 matches, 52.4% (the scoring system was different – 3-2-1-0).
Hartley joined a problematic team, but quickly improved his game: in his first season he reached the final of the Gagarin Cup (lost to CSKA 0-4), and won the trophy on the third attempt. Under Hartley, Avangard was incredibly stable in the regular season: twice with 83 points and once with 84. The success of those “hawks” is precisely the merit of the coach: he did not accept a team from perestroika, but certainly not a contender for the cup. This is how Hartley made Avangard himself. According to statistics, Mikhail Kravets scored even more points with Omsk (69%), but the team spent both playoffs with him unsuccessfully.
Sergey Fedorov took charge of CSKA in the middle of the 2022 off-season. He never planned to be in charge, but he was asked to do so. He has two Gagarin Cups and zero questions for the regular season. After so many years in the NHL, Fedorov understood that the big games are played in the playoffs better than anyone. His Detroit once broke the NHL record for most championship victories, but was left without the Cup. Alexei Zhamnov and Viktor Kozlov have not yet coached clubs among the richest in the KHL, and despite this, they remain among the leaders.
An interesting case Ilya Vorobyov. He took Magnitka after Mike Keenan was fired, immediately won the Gagarin Cup and reached the final a year later. His subsequent career followed a rollercoaster trajectory. Failure in the third regular season with Metallurg – in the end she ended the season with Viktor Kozlov. Then the most powerful regular season in 2018/19 with SKA (83.1% of points), but the dismissal. The return to Magnitogorsk was remembered for another playoff final, but he did not stay at CSKA. This is further confirmation that over a long distance – such as more than three or four seasons – coaches can experience both ups and downs, and one must be careful when drawing conclusions based only on statistics.
In the second five – Dmitry Kvartalnov And Oleg Znarokbut their careers developed in the classic way – from simpler teams. Kvartalnov spent his first five years in the KHL in Severstal and Siberia – and, by the way, never dropped below 50%, and missed the playoffs only in the first season. And then he got a chance at a top club with great resources – CSKA, where he truly revealed himself: in all three seasons under the leadership of Kvartalnov, the army team finished with the Continental Cup.
Since the 2014/15 season, Kvartalnov has consistently confirmed his status as a top-class coach. And during this period he has 69.3% of all possible points – only Igor Nikitin is more effective. There is no victory in the Gagarin Cup yet, but there was a final with CSKA, there was a wonderful “Ak Bars” of Galimov and Voronkov (two seasons with 75% points in the regular season), which was 10 minutes short of winning the Eastern Conference in 2021.
Oleg Znarok won the Gagarin Cup three times (twice with Dynamo Moscow and once with SKA), but he also did not start his coaching career with a contender – the first club was HC MVD. And even with him he created a sensation: after the first season, missing the playoffs, the Balashikha club reached the final, where it lost to Ak Bars in seven matches. With Dynamo, Znarok went through the regular season quite calmly, without wasting extra energy – so there was more of it left for the playoffs.
After a pause, he headed the modest Spartak, a team at the level of the first round of the playoffs. This and the unsuccessful three months in Kazan spoiled the statistics. Without the blurry ending and the first season in the HC MVD, Znarka would have been in third place with 68.6% in the overall table.
Some will be surprised by its absence from the top 10 Zinetu Bilaletdinovabut he always had his own plan for the regular season, and he strictly adhered to it. “Ak Bars” could trudge outside the playoff zone all autumn and the first month of winter, and at the right time they added more. His assistant Valery Belov, who was chief in Kazan for two years, has even higher figures, but no one would think of comparing their merits. Three Cups and two finals in 10 years with Kazan in the KHL – these numbers warm Bill’s retired heart more than the percentage of points in the regular season.
What about the NHL?
If we exclude everyone who played less than one full season, the top 10 looks like this:
It is unlikely that many will guess the name of the most effective scoring coach in NHL history. Tom Johnson coached Boston from the 1970/71 to 1972/73 season, but even managed to snag the Stanley Cup.
Ralph “Kuni” Weiland was a coach for even less time – only two years. He also worked in Boston, only thirty years earlier. And he also led the club to the Cup. But if Johnson went for a promotion – to the management of the Bruins, then Weiland’s path is surprising: after Boston, Ralph coached in the AHL and the Harvard team in the student league.
Third place goes to Scotty Bowman, one of the most successful coaches in history, having won nine Stanley Cups. The main clubs in his career were Montreal and Detroit, with whom he became champions a total of eight times. With a point percentage of 65.7%, Scotty would not be in the top 3 in the KHL, but again, in hockey coaches are not valued for these numbers.
*****
The conclusion is obvious, but we will write it down separately. Over three seasons at SKA, Roman Rotenberg has secured his place on the list of the most media personalities in the history of the league, but his coaching abilities are still a big question.
He did not work with clubs from the hockey periphery, which have to be content with the leftovers from the player market. He has not encountered the fact that the budget can be limited by more than just the salary cap. Possessing impressive resources and the trust of management, he never built a championship team in St. Petersburg, and with each season it only performed worse in both the regular season and the playoffs.
Beautiful numbers may please the eye, but you definitely can’t argue with these facts.
Why Rotenberg didn’t lead Dynamo instead of Kudashov
What’s wrong with the KHL calendar?
Photo: RIA Novosti/Aleksey Kolchin, Alexey Filippov, Grigory Sysoev, Vladimir Fedorenko
