Will somebody please make sense of the Minsk Hussars? They won the Season 8 Cup, lost Carey Price and Nicklas Backstrom to free agency, plummeted in the standings and were much clsoer to missing the playoffs than defending their crown, but now suddenly … they are on the best run of results in the league.
Thomas Powell, Minsk Hussars left wing
In their last 9 games, the Hussars are 9-0 and have outscored their opponents 34-18 in those games. Is it possible the team that just two weeks ago seemed destined for a major rebuild may actually be poised to blaze through the playoff rounds again?
If they are, credit team defense because neither goalie – 37-year-old Henrik Lundquist nor Chad Johnson – has done a great job of stopping pucks. But no team in the league has allowed fewer shots against per game than the Hussars. They average only 26.1 shots against per game.
The defense corps seems to have really tightened up recently. The six players back there are all locked in for several seasons if GM Igor Kirunov wants to keep them together. Maxim Chudinov and Aaron Ekblad are about the best building blocks a team can have and they are both 25 or younger.
Up front, Thomas Powell has recently been promoted over Milan Lucic on the top line with Jordan Staal and Patrick Kane and Powell has looked good there. The Australian was voted as the league’s top defensive forward last season (and Playoff MVP) and if he can score a goal in the season finale in Oslo, he will have reached the 30-goal plateau for the second straight season.
Powell and Staal are formidable defensive forwards, as is underrated Jacob Josefson, the center on the second line who leads the forwards in plus-minus at +18. The Swede has been a fixture in the Hussar lineup since the league began, but this year, he really blossomed. His 95 takeaways and 48 blocks are personal bests for him, as is his 63 point total.
The Hussars will finish 3rd in the Kharlamov Division and face one of the teams ahead of them – either St. Petersburg or Helsinki – in the first round of the playoffs. In the off season. they will get either the 11th or 12th pick in the draft and they will also be hoping the Ottawa Senators send prospect Alex Formenton down to juniors in the next week because he is off to a slow start and that could kill his Websim attributes in a virtual evolution league like EURO.
