Every year, there seems to be one team out of the bunch at the IIHF World Championship Division I Group A tournament that exceeds expectations. Last year, Romania was expected to be in a tough battle to avoid relegation but instead just missed being promoted on a tiebreaker. Two years ago it was Poland, which was promoted immediately after coming up from Group B.
This year, two games in at least, that team is Ukraine. Ranked 27th in the world, the Ukrainians opened their schedule against the tournament’s two top-ranked teams, taking both to shootouts – a 4-3 loss to Great Britain followed by a 3-2 win over Italy.
“We played with a team that just came down from the top division and we played evenly with them,” Ukrainian head coach Dmytro Khrystych said after the team’s opener against Great Britain, but he could have said the same after the Italian game. “That’s our goal for right now: get to this level and stay here, and advance if possible, but maybe that’s more for the future.”
Khrystych might be better known to international hockey fans as Dmitri Khristich from his days as an NHL player in the 1990s. Near the end of his playing career, he represented Ukraine in three elite-level World Championships and the 2002 Winter Olympics, where his teammates included fellow NHLers Ruslan Fedotenko and Oleksii Ponikarovskyi. However, Ukrainian hockey has changed immeasurably since then.
Last year, Khrystych took over a young team in Division I Group B. With much of the country still being ravaged by an ongoing war, its players were scattered across 10 countries in Europe and North America. But under the team’s first-year coach, the Ukrainians won five straight games, outscoring their opponents 31-2.
“It’s changed a lot,” said team captain Igor Merezkho, who at 26 is playing in his fifth World Championship. “We have better tactics now. We’re skating more and trying to be aggressive. Sometimes it doesn’t work but usually it works for us.”
“The teams we’re playing against have more skilled players, they play in higher leagues, so to beat them we have to have structure and play by the coaches’ rules and we’re trying to make it happen on the ice,” said forward Andri Denyskin. “I think you can tell from the scoreboard, the results just keep getting better. I think our coach is doing a great job. I can see huge improvements and we’re just riding our way.”
Asked what he’s tried to instill in the team since taking over, Khrystych said, “We’re asking the guys to play much better on transition from defence to offence, and also to manage the puck better and keep it in their zone. We want to limit giveaways.
“We’re trying to play as a team. We’re asking guys to buy into our system – that’s the most important thing.”
But it’s not only Khrystych’s coaching that’s helped the players. Ironically, being forced to play abroad has exposed many of the Ukrainian players to better coaching and training conditions and higher levels of competition than they ever would have got at home. Merezkho now patrols the blueline for HC Plzen in the Czech Extraliga, winger Daniil Trakht was captain of his Finnish junior team and played a professional Liiga playoff game this season for Lukko, and the goalie that backstopped them to a shootout against Great Britain – 18-year-old Alexander Levshyn – plays Junior A hockey in Toronto, Canada.
“When the guys play in leagues better than in Ukraine, they get faster, stronger, smarter, and that helps us to build a better team,” said Khrystych.
After a day off on Tuesday, Ukraine faces host Romania on Wednesday, Poland on Thursday, and the goal is to have enough points so as not to be fighting to avoid relegation on Saturday against Japan. At the other end of the standings, teams have earned back-to-back promotions before, including Poland a couple of years ago and Great Britain in 2017 and 2018.
“We’ve been that team before,” said British coach Peter Russel, dismissing the notion that the Ukrainians had taken his team by surprise in the opener. “Seven, eight years ago, that was us, so we knew what we were up against. They’ve been together a long time as well.”
“Maybe it’s in our thoughts and wishes that we can do the same thing but it’s not our main goal, because we haven’t established ourselves at this level yet,” said Khrystych. “Coming in here, we knew it was going to be really tough games against every opponent, maybe some better than others, but all of them are ranked higher than us.
“So we have to prepare for all of them as if they’re going to be really hard games.”