San Jose Barracuda
BREAKING: Ivan Chekhovich Will Play in KHL for ENTIRE Season
San Jose Hockey Now has learned that Ivan Chekhovich will skate for HC Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod for the entirety of the 2020-21 KHL season.
Chekhovich will not be returning to North America when 2020-21 San Jose Sharks training camp opens.
The Sharks retain Chekhovich’s rights; this is a full-season loan.
San Jose Sharks @SanJoseSharks Ivan Chekhovich signed one-year contract with "Torpedo". Welcome to Nizhny Novgorod! pic.twitter.com/58DJj6DHob
— HC Torpedo (@torpedonn_eng) October 20, 2020
The prospect will attempt to find his game in his native Russia after a difficult 2019-20 with the San Jose Barracuda.
Coming off a 105-point QMJHL campaign in 2018-19, Chekhovich was expected to adjust quickly to professional play. Instead, his production and time on ice sagged in his first full professional season. The 2017 San Jose Sharks seventh-round pick scored just four goals and 12 points in 42 games, and according to InStat Hockey, was San Jose’s least-used forward, averaging under 12 minutes per night.
He was also healthy scratched on multiple occasions, as recently as two games before the pause.
Co-head coach Mike Chiasson revealed on March 7th: “I think it’s a compete thing for him right now.”
Chiasson, on scratching Chekhovich tonight: "I think it's a compete thing for him right now." pic.twitter.com/ZkmVA7OQ0J
— Sheng Peng (@Sheng_Peng) March 8, 2020
It was truly an up-and-down season for the offensive winger. Despite his general lack of productivity, Chiasson and co-head coach Jimmy Bonneau had praised Chekhovich’s coachability and work ethic in February and January:
Tough year for Chekhovich, but Bonneau thinks he's turning corner: "Instead of accepting getting pinned or falling down in traffic, he's fighting through…Been better on wall in d-zone too. When that happens, icetime goes up. When icetime goes up, confidence usually follows." pic.twitter.com/0IjLbETdDo
— Sheng Peng (@Sheng_Peng) February 18, 2020
Mike Chiasson did rave about Chekhovich's coachability & work ethic: "Everyone's got their own learning curve. Credit to this kid, he comes in everyday & he works…Hopefully, it's not too much longer, he can start to find his confidence."
— Sheng Peng (@Sheng_Peng) January 12, 2020
“I can’t find my game, honestly. It’s not the game I want to see,” Chekovich said candidly in January. “Everybody expects way more from me. It’s kind of pressure.”
So now Chekhovich, like fellow San Jose Sharks prospect Jonathan Dahlen, will get a chance to find his scoring touch at home. Dahlen struggled too in the AHL in 2018-19 before returning home to Sweden to play for Timra IK. After leading Allsvenskan in scoring in 2019-20, Dahlen is on fire once again, putting up 12 points in just 5 games so far this year.
“The idea is to play rather than sit around,” Chekhovich’s agent Mark Gandler told San Jose Hockey Now.
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So because this is an entire year does that mean that we most likely will not have an AHL season this year? If that is the case the Sharks are probably scrambling to find a places for other AHL players.
Not a bad guess, but in this case, I think it’s more that Chekhovich needs to find his game after a tough year
let me just remove the uncertainty of the AHL season from the convo. isn’t the AHL supposed to be a “development league”? what’s the deal with the Sharks inability to develop their high skill players at that level? first Dahlen and now Chekhovich. it’s looking painfully obvious to me that Roy and Co. might not be so interested in player development as much as they are in padding their personal win-loss records.
yeah, i know this is the “cynical” or “tin-foil hat” hot take, but tell me honestly nobody else is thinking along these lines-at least a little bit.
High risk/high reward guys, by nature, are likely to fail, right? So I’m not sure if that’s exactly the strongest take, killing Sommer etc. on developing guys like that. It’s against odds those guys develop to stardom to begin with. And I have heard this take before — I just see no substance to support it. Now if these guys (Goldobin, for ex.) go elsewhere to do amazing things, that might be something else, but they haven’t. Obv Meier and Labanc are high-skill recent guys who don’t seem to be “hampered” in any way by SJS development. Didn’t spend a… Read more »
Goldobin went to VAN where they have even a worse rep for player development. i think you make fair points though. Labanc-whom you brought up-is a good “exception to the rule” example though to counter my opinion. i think they’ve tried in certain respects to get him to conform to the mold w/o being too punitive with his chances/ice time. i believe the Sharks historically draft high floor players for a couple of reasons beyond just the math that projects they’ll at least get NHL games out of most of their prospects. 1. they have a certain mold they try… Read more »
High-skill guys don’t have to be physical, they just have to be actually highly-skilled (relative to NHL players). There’s space in San Jose for highly skilled but not physical if you’re Karlsson or even Labanc. Suomela isn’t even close to even Labanc. You may remember FTF pieces where I talked to scouts about Suo — nobody in those chairs see it. Suo was on the block during the summer too — nobody biting and I doubt Doug was asking for much. So you can let a Suo loose and get maybe 30 points out of him but really nothing else… Read more »
High risk/reward guys are one thing. Sommer has consistently done zero favors for the other guys though, Wishart, Petrecki, Wrenn, Doherty, Bergman, and that’s only high drafted prospects in recent history.
Drafting is a crap shoot but the Sharks not turning these guys into anything, at all speaks volumes of the development system and specifically the AHL system the Sharks have in place.
Is it any wonder the winningest coach never gets poached for an NHL job?
It’s hard to pin the failure of those prospects solely on the Sharks’ development approach. I would argue few of those guys were good picks to begin with despite where they were selected. Outside of Bergman and maybe Petrecki, all of those players were low-scoring guys their draft year. No amount of development is going to turn a hulking defenseman who scored 0.3 points/game in the OHL as a teenager into an NHLer. Petrecki for example, who scored almost 0.5 points/game his draft season in the relatively weak USHL, also accumulated massive penalty minute totals his entire career. That reeks… Read more »
Again, you’re talking about guys who did nothing elsewhere. So what, you implying that Sommer is somehow ruining these guys, stopping these guys from ever becoming good players? That’s pretty wild, I think, and if Sommer was actually ruining prospects, I think SJS would’ve caught wind of it a long time ago. More likely, as Erik noted, these weren’t particularly good players to begin with. That’s supported by fact — again — that they didn’t achieve much outside of org. Now I’m not saying he’s the most amazing coach ever and it’s a fair point that I’ve never heard any… Read more »
honestly, you can go back even further in time.
If he can get big minutes in the KHL it will definitely help his development. Look forward to seeing him again for 21-22
He’s still a young kid in a man’s league, so it’ll be tough for him to get big minutes. But it’ll be a great sign if he does
This sounds like a good step for him. Who knows what the AHL season looks like this year. He can probably get more minutes and more games in the KHL. And his mindset sounds like it’s in the right place too, willing to work hard and not ignoring issues or blaming anybody else
Yea, makes sense on many fronts. Hopefully he can follow the Dahlen path, find his confidence and game
This is an interesting trend that we are embarking on. I try to think back to my youth and wonder how it might be to move to half a world away and adjust fully.
Granted, this is sports but I’m guessing this is an extension of the good will the Sharks are developing. Making sure that players get traded to where they want and the signing for Ozzy at the draft.
It all feels good.
By and large, the Sharks do show that they care about a player as an individual; I agree this is another example of it, like Dahlen. I’m not sure every NHL franchise would’ve permitted Dahlen a SECOND year in Allsvenskan. And people may say that’s taking it too far, and I kind of agree, but it shows how SJS thinks. It’s all about ultimate payoff, a happy player is a successful player