The Decline of Vladimir Krutov

[jarek]

Way too much stock given to statistics in the Soviet domestic league, considering in a lot of ways it was basically a glorified exhibition league to prepare the players for international play.

By the 80s, the Red Army Team was so far superior to every other team, a cynic might just say that Makarov cared more about beating up on weaklings in basically meaningless games than Krutov did.

Anyway, Krutov's voting record for "Soviet Player of the Year" in the mid 80s speaks for itself.

Also ignored is that even domestically, Krutov was basically Makarov's equal as a goal scorer, while Makarov's big leads in points were mainly driven by assists.

Anyway, I was really happy HT picked Krutov right before I had to make a tough decision about whether I wanted him.

You say that as if it's a bad thing. Makarov was still the far superior offensive player.

 

[Hawkey Town 18]

To me, how any of those international guys did in the NHL is a big deal. It tells me approximately how they would have done in the NHL in their primes abroad. That Krutov was such an unmitigated disaster, whether fair or not, tells me that he probably would have suffered a similar fate in an earlier part of his career.

There's a pretty good sample size of Canada Cup games and Super Series games to give an accurate picture of that.

Also, if Krutov is in the NHL at an early age then he probably also grows up much more exposed to Western culture (like today's Russian players) and then the adjustment is much smaller. I would also say it's just plain easier to make adjustments when you're young and haven't been doing things the same way for years and years. There's a lot of other factors at play.

 

[Theokritos]

To me, how any of those international guys did in the NHL is a big deal. It tells me approximately how they would have done in the NHL in their primes abroad. That Krutov was such an unmitigated disaster, whether fair or not, tells me that he probably would have suffered a similar fate in an earlier part of his career.

A guy from the Soviet Union who fails to adapt to a foreign world. Send prime Phil Esposito or prime Guy Lafleur or prime Mario Lemieux to the USSR to play for CSKA Moscow, let them work out under that training regime and what's the outcome? At least one of them if not two or all three would fail to cope with the months-long rigours of the Tarasovian and Tikhonovian summer camps. Mental or physical breakdown or both. So what would we say? That Esposito/Lafleur/Lemieux tore apart his domestic league but couldn't even crack the line-up of CSKA Moscow? Cut from the roster & sent down to the lower tiers for conditioning? Not good enough for the Soviet league?

 

[jarek]

I believe what I believe. Fair or not, what I posted above is how I view it.

 

[Batis]

In my opinion there is no doubt that Krutov was the second best Soviet forward during the 1980´s. Both when we look at international scoring, domestic scoring and Soviet player of the year voting. And I am sorry but I have a hard time believing that Dave Taylor who did not even manage to make the final squad of any best on best Team Canada was as good offensively as the second best forward of the Soviet Union. If that would be true it should be seen as a miracle that the Soviets ever managed to win a single game against Canada in the 80´s. Even when considering their superior chemistry. I personally think that Makarov being as far ahead of Krutov in the Soviet League as Dionne was ahead of Taylor in the NHL rather is an indication of that Makarov was a better and more consistent offensive player than Dionne was, more than it points to Krutov and Taylor being on the same level offensively.

Also considering that international tournaments were the most important part of the season for the Soviets I personally think that more focus should be put on them than on Soviet league play. And Krutov was a lot closer to Makarov on the international stage than he was domestically. Here is a small comparison of these four players international careers.

Scoring in all major international tournaments:
Sergei Makarov (11 WHCs, 3 Olympics, 3 Canada Cups)
145 gp, 82 g, 100 a, 182 pts, 1.26 PPG

Vladimir Krutov (7 WHCs, 3 Olympics, 3 Canada Cups)
112 gp, 73 g, 64 a, 137 pts, 1.22 PPG

Marcel Dionne (4 WHCs, 2 Canada Cups)
50 gp, 26 g, 17 a, 43 pts, 0.86 PPG

Dave Taylor (3 WHCs)
30 gp, 7 g, 10 a, 17 pts, 0.57 PPG

Scoring in Canada Cups only:

Sergei Makarov 22 gp, 16 g, 15 a, 31 pts, 1.41 PPG
Vladimir Krutov 22 gp, 14 g, 16 a, 30 pts, 1.36 PPG
Marcel Dionne 13 gp, 5 g, 6 a, 11 pts, 0.85 PPG

Both Makarov and Krutov were clearly more productive than Dionne and Taylor on the international stage. No matter if we look at all major international tournaments or only Canada Cups. Now I am not pretending that Krutov was as good offensively as Dionne but his massive advantage compared to Taylor internationally makes it very hard for me to believe that Taylor was on Krutovs level offensively.

 

[jarek]

In my opinion there is no doubt that Krutov was the second best Soviet forward during the 1980´s. Both when we look at international scoring, domestic scoring and Soviet player of the year voting. And I am sorry but I have a hard time believing that Dave Taylor who did not even manage to make the final squad of any best on best Team Canada was as good offensively as the second best forward of the Soviet Union. If that would be true it should be seen as a miracle that the Soviets ever managed to win a single game against Canada in the 80´s. Even when considering their superior chemistry. I personally think that Makarov being as far ahead of Krutov in the Soviet League as Dionne was ahead of Taylor in the NHL rather is an indication of that Makarov was a better and more consistent offensive player than Dionne was, more than it points to Krutov and Taylor being on the same level offensively.

Also considering that international tournaments were the most important part of the season for the Soviets I personally think that more focus should be put on them than on Soviet league play. And Krutov was a lot closer to Makarov on the international stage than he was domestically. Here is a small comparison of these four players international careers.

Scoring in all major international tournaments:
Sergei Makarov (11 WHCs, 3 Olympics, 3 Canada Cups)
145 gp, 82 g, 100 a, 182 pts, 1.26 PPG

Vladimir Krutov (7 WHCs, 3 Olympics, 3 Canada Cups)
112 gp, 73 g, 64 a, 137 pts, 1.22 PPG

Marcel Dionne (4 WHCs, 2 Canada Cups)
50 gp, 26 g, 17 a, 43 pts, 0.86 PPG

Dave Taylor (3 WHCs)
30 gp, 7 g, 10 a, 17 pts, 0.57 PPG

Scoring in Canada Cups only:

Sergei Makarov 22 gp, 16 g, 15 a, 31 pts, 1.41 PPG
Vladimir Krutov 22 gp, 14 g, 16 a, 30 pts, 1.36 PPG
Marcel Dionne 13 gp, 5 g, 6 a, 11 pts, 0.85 PPG

Both Makarov and Krutov were clearly more productive than Dionne and Taylor on the international stage. No matter if we look at all major international tournaments or only Canada Cups. Now I am not pretending that Krutov was as good offensively as Dionne but his massive advantage compared to Taylor internationally makes it very hard for me to believe that Taylor was on Krutovs level offensively.

Taylor had a lot more to his game than just offense. If you look at the overall picture of both Krutov and Taylor, I just don't see a huge difference personally. Perhaps my opinion should not be considered, however, as I hold in high regard certain things that most people here do not seem to.

 

[Batis]

Taylor had a lot more to his game than just offense. If you look at the overall picture of both Krutov and Taylor, I just don't see a huge difference personally. Perhaps my opinion should not be considered, however, as I hold in high regard certain things that most people here do not seem to.

In my opinion Krutov had alot more to his game than offence to. Krutov and Makarov were both great penalty killers and I personally think that Krutov and Makarov were two of the best forecheckers in the world throughout the 80´s. During the 1987 Canada Cup Krutovs edge over Makarov defensively was pointed out as one of the reasons why Krutov had passed Makarov as the Soviets best forward at that point. See the video below.

 

[seventieslord]

I think saying he's a Dave Taylor level talent is really stretching it. Lanny McDonald I could see. In the wingers project I did consider him in the league of Recchi and Robitaille and Kariya, though ultimately I voted them top-3 and did not give him a vote at all. For two rounds, I think.
Where we ranked him is probably in the "best case scenario" range for him, and also that's assuming he was 100% clean. There's certainly more reason to believe that he wasn't, than there is for any other elite player.

 

[Sturminator]

By the 80s, the Red Army Team was so far superior to every other team, a cynic might just say that Makarov cared more about beating up on weaklings in basically meaningless games than Krutov did.

The old "he wasn't trying hard" argument, eh?

So we're supposed to judge Krutov's true talent level based on what he did for a couple of weeks a year? Somewhere, Dick Duff is crying.

Anyway, Krutov's voting record for "Soviet Player of the Year" in the mid 80s speaks for itself.

It certainly speaks to his international performances.

 

[Sturminator]

I think saying he's a Dave Taylor level talent is really stretching it. Lanny McDonald I could see. In the wingers project I did consider him in the league of Recchi and Robitaille and Kariya, though ultimately I voted them top-3 and did not give him a vote at all. For two rounds, I think.

Where we ranked him is probably in the "best case scenario" range for him, and also that's assuming he was 100% clean. There's certainly more reason to believe that he wasn't, than there is for any other elite player.

Yeah, maybe you can tell us a little bit more how you arrived at this:

so I took each season individually and translated soviet points into NHL points, then into a vsx score.

So, you have to understand that this is a fudge, but a fairly well-informed fudge. I understand if you don't want to put any weight into it at all.

But these are Krutov's best 7 scores:

105
96
93
91
90
76
75

...while going through Krutov's numbers. You have him leading the NHL in points in one season?! When? How? He never led the Soviet league in points, and was only even vaguely close to Makarov in a single season. Looks like you're pulling these numbers straight out of the ether.

Some people are taking Krutov's short-tournament international performances grossly out of proportion to the entirety of his career, it seems.

 

[Sturminator]

Even when considering their superior chemistry. I personally think that Makarov being as far ahead of Krutov in the Soviet League as Dionne was ahead of Taylor in the NHL rather is an indication of that Makarov was a better and more consistent offensive player than Dionne was...

Yeah...uh, no. Marcel Dionne is roughly on the same level as Howie Morenz offensively in an all-time sense. Comparing Makarov to him is, if anything, highly complimentary to the Russian.

 

[jarek]

If we're ONLY going to be taking Krutov's international performances seriously and ignore his Soviet domestic league scoring, how big of a sample size does that give us in NHL terms? 2 seasons, maybe?

Yet we berate guys like Karlsson for not having played long enough.

Hmm..

 

[seventieslord]

Sturm, give me some ****ing credit here.

If you take a moment to think about it, you would know I obviously don't have krutov leading the nhl in points in any season.

The reason scores like that are possible in the little exercise I did should be obvious - I didn't change the real scores of any nhl player. So in seasons where Makarov was likely better than the benchmark player - and I think there are many - where crouton was close enough to him, he could have a score above 100 himself.

Of course, the next step would be to pretend they actually were in the nhl and adjust everyone's scores to the new benchmark, but isn't that getting way too hypothetical?

 

[Hobnobs]

To me, how any of those international guys did in the NHL is a big deal. It tells me approximately how they would have done in the NHL in their primes abroad. That Krutov was such an unmitigated disaster, whether fair or not, tells me that he probably would have suffered a similar fate in an earlier part of his career.

Why?

 

[jarek]

Why?

When no evidence exists to support a theory, all we can rely on is conjecture. If I were to extrapolate Krutov's "performance" in the NHL to, say, 10 years earlier, I think he'd have had the same difficulty adjusting to North America, but being younger and in allegedly better shape, would likely have done better than he did. He probably would have struggled for a couple years or so, then went on to have a respectable NHL career.

For what it's worth, I do not think any of the Russians, save maybe Firsov, Mikhailov, Fetisov, Makarov, Tretiak, and Kharlamov would have come anywhere close to the dominance they displayed during their peaks, if they were to play their entire careers in the NHL. This is, again, based on conjecture.

 

[Sturminator]

Sturm, give me some ****ing credit here.

If you take a moment to think about it, you would know I obviously don't have krutov leading the nhl in points in any season.

The reason scores like that are possible in the little exercise I did should be obvious - I didn't change the real scores of any nhl player. So in seasons where Makarov was likely better than the benchmark player - and I think there are many - where crouton was close enough to him, he could have a score above 100 himself.

Of course, the next step would be to pretend they actually were in the nhl and adjust everyone's scores to the new benchmark, but isn't that getting way too hypothetical?

There is only a single season in which Krutov was even close to Makarov in points: 1986-87, when the leaderboard looked like this:

1986-87 (40 games)

1 Sergueï Makarov CSKA 21 32 53
2 Vladimir Krutov CSKA 26 24 50
3 Igor Larionov CSKA 20 26 46
4 Anatoli Semenov Dynamo 15 29 44
5 Vladimir Shchurenko Voskresensk 24 18 42

...so I have to conclude that this is the season where you generate a score of 107 for Krutov.

Funny thing is, this was also the only season Larionov was ever close to Makarov. So does Larionov get about a 100 for this year, too? Hell, in terms of scoring percentage, Semenov and Shchurenko actually have "typical Krutov" performances this season (both around 80% of M's scoring). Interesting, that. Did the whole rest of the Soviet league get substantially better in this season, or was it a down year for Makarov?

I'll give you as much credit as you deserve. Your method was to insert Makarov's performance into the NHL in a completely arbitrary way and then base Krutov's performance off of that. Garbage in, garbage out.

 

[seventieslord]

Do you have a way to insert Makarov's performance info the nhl in a way that is not arbitrary?

 

[Sturminator]

Do you have a way to insert Makarov's performance info the nhl in a way that is not arbitrary?

I think my assumption that he was roughly as good as Marcel Dionne offensively holds up a lot better than trying to fabricate an NHL VsX number for him for every single season of his career.

Evaluations where there is no statistical common ground are always going to be arbitrary, based more upon our intuitions than on any sort of logical rigor. And that's ok...if this is the best method available to us, then it is the one we must use. But...our intuitions about player performance where there is no statistical common ground are formed in a holistic way. We have "general impressions" about the respective skill levels of players from having seen them play over a long period of time. These impressions, insofar as they are reliable, at all, are only reliable over a long period of time. Assuming that a guy like Makarov was about as good as a guy like Dionne is one thing. Assuming that Makarov sustained this exact level of production homogenously over the course of his whole career is quite another, especially when we know that Dionne did not (and really, who does?).

Trying to generate granular data from holistic impressions is the path to confusion, and it looks very much like your method runs aground in 1986-87.

 

[jarek]

Do you have a way to insert Makarov's performance info the nhl in a way that is not arbitrary?

I don't think there is any way to do this in a reasonable manner. It is just impossible to tell how much worse the Russian league was at the time compared to the NHL. If one could figure that out, then I think all one would need to do is adjust a Russian player's points by GP and the difference in scoring levels between the Russian league and the NHL, then discount that total by how much weaker the league as a whole was.

The problem with such a method is that I don't think each player in the Russian league should be treated the same way by the discount. For example, I think Makarov's score might be discounted to 90-95%, while a guy like Krutov, might take a hit down to 80-85%, or something along those lines.

 

[seventieslord]

I think my assumption that he was roughly as good as Marcel Dionne offensively holds up a lot better than trying to fabricate an NHL VsX number for him for every single season of his career. Yeah, I think that's a much better method.

I asked if you had something that wasn't arbitrary, not something equally arbitrary but in your opinion better.

 

[Sturminator]

I asked if you had something that wasn't arbitrary, not something equally arbitrary but in your opinion better.

I'm perfectly happy to let the court of public opinion decide whose method of squaring the circle is better.

 

[VMBM]

Krutov is the only one who went from superstar to useless in a matter of months

Then again, Krutov's 1988-89 season was already a lot less dazzling than the seasons between 1985 and 1988 had been: he was the top forward at the 1986 and 1987 WHCs, 1987 CC All-Star, (1983 &) 1985-87 WHC All-Star LW, the top scorer at the 1988 Olympics, 1987 Soviet MVP etc. But in the 1988-89 season, he was only 5th in the Soviet MVP voting with measly 11 pts to Makarov's 146, beaten by e.g. Bykov (an underrated player, though) and Mylnikov. For the first time in ages, he did not get an all-star nod at the [1989] WHC, where he scored only 6 points in 10 games - compare that to the 15 pts in 8 games at the 1988 Olympics.

Summa summarum, I guess he was still "superstar" in 1989, but there were signs of his (as well as the whole Green Unit's ) decline even before his, er, unlucky stint in North America.

 

[VMBM]

For what it's worth, I do not think any of the Russians, save maybe Firsov, Mikhailov, Fetisov, Makarov, Tretiak, and Kharlamov would have come anywhere close to the dominance they displayed during their peaks, if they were to play their entire careers in the NHL. This is, again, based on conjecture.

I think Krutov's character issues would have been the only reasons that had prevented him from becoming a star in the NHL - if he had arrived there in his early 20s, that is.

Mikhailov, hmmm, I'm positive that he would have succeeded in the NHL at some level; he had the mental toughness, good skills, NA playing style (though no slapshot whatsoever), immense work ethic (Tarasov & Tikhonov both praised it).
However, I can't see him as a superstar à la Guy Lafleur or Bobby Hull, or even very near that. Simply put, unlike e.g. Firsov, Makarov, and yes, Krutov, he did not have 'superstar talent' IMO. Like said, Krutov was a Soviet ntl team level player already at 19, whereas Mikhailov made Team USSR only when he was 24 or so (in 1968/69). Of course, he more than made up for it by ageing much better than Krutov, but I still maintain that Krutov had more going for him than Mikhailov did.

Anyone else think that Mikhailov is slightly overrated here (ATD & HFBoards generally)? And he is my 2nd favourite player of all-time, but still...

 

[Batis]

Yeah...uh, no. Marcel Dionne is roughly on the same level as Howie Morenz offensively in an all-time sense. Comparing Makarov to him is, if anything, highly complimentary to the Russian.

Marcel Dionne was a great regular season performer yes. But he was not very spectacular in neither the Stanley Cup playoffs nor on the international stage. Makarov on the other hand was great both domestically in the Soviet League and on the international stage which makes me rank him as the better and more consistent player offensively.

Both Makarov and Krutov scored 12 points in 8 games against the best Canada had to offer in Canada Cup competition. As a comparison Dionne only scored 4 points in 11 games against the Soviet national team in Canada Cup and WHC competition. I included both the Canada Cup and the World Championships for Dionne as he faced the best of the Soviets in both tournaments. Small sample size yes but Dionne really struggled offensively against the Soviets while both Makarov and Krutov scored in bunches against the best Canada had to offer. I would rank Makarov and Dionne roughly equal based on regular season offence in their respective leagues but I think that Makarov gets the advantage because of his superior international performances in general and his ability to continue producing when he faced the best of Canada while Dionne more or less became a nonfactor when he faced the best Soviets.

 

[Sturminator]

Both Makarov and Krutov scored 12 points in 8 games against the best Canada had to offer in Canada Cup competition. As a comparison Dionne only scored 4 points in 11 games against the Soviet national team in Canada Cup and WHC competition. I included both the Canada Cup and the World Championships for Dionne as he faced the best of the Soviets in both tournaments. Small sample size yes but Dionne really struggled offensively against the Soviets while both Makarov and Krutov scored in bunches against the best Canada had to offer.

Yes, it is a microscopically small sample size, and not even remotely an apples-to-apples comparison. This argument is not worth the time it took you to type it.