If you’re not already familiar with the situation, former Red Wings forward Sergei Fedorov won a Gargarin Cup as the coach of CSKA Moscow last spring, and, also last spring, former Red Wing Igor Larionov inked a 3-year deal to coach Torpedo Nizhny Novogorod.
Slava Kozlov is also an assistant coach with Moscow’s Spartak, so the coaching bug has caught on with former Russian Red Wings, as Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff notes:
As a player with the Red Wings, Larionov found the defensive hockey preferred by most teams during the NHL of the 1990s to be abhorrent. He kept calling it “destroy hockey.”
His promise as a coach is that his club will play an up-tempo brand of hockey.
“We want to play some exciting hockey, which should be fun to play,” Larionov told KHL.ru. “Our game will be aimed at attacking. We are not interested in playing for a 1-0 result, we want to score a lot in every game. We want to play some combinational, creative hockey.”
Among his players are his son Igor Larionov II and forward Dennis Yan, last season a member of the Red Wings’ top farm club, the AHL Grand Rapids Griffins.
Continued; as Duff notes, Slava Fetisov is the chairman of the KHL’s Board of Directors, and he represents Vladivostok in the Russian Federal Assembly. Fetisov is the reason why Vladivostok’s hockey arena was built, so he had some ties to the original iteration of the Admiral Vladivostok.
As you might imagine, all of this stuff gets a little complicated given that the KHL’s teams are mostly owned by oligarchs who have close ties to a certain hockey-playing despot…
