There was a slight amount of panic in the air when we all caught wind of what was happening to Yegor Zavragin to start his KHL season. The top goaltending prospect for the Philadelphia Flyers (and one of their best prospects no matter the position) was set to have an increase in opportunities — building on his stellar KHL rookie season last year. But that didn’t happen.
Last season, Zavragin was set to just hang out on HK Sochi, a lesser KHL club compared to his actual team SKA St. Petersburg. He was sent on loan to get more opportunity while still playing in the same league he normally would. SKA could go and not risk their season on a rookie netminder, and Zavragin gets to play more games — seemed like a classic win-win scenario. But after starting his season with Sochi and posting up a mind-boggling .941 save percentage and 2.21 goals against average, he was swiftly recalled to St. Petersburg — because why would they not want that player actually winning hockey games for them?
Zavragin finished his season with 37 appearances for SKA, earning a .912 save percentage, a 2.55 goals against average, and a 17-11-3 record in one of the best programs overseas. So, considering Zavragin just did that for SKA St. Petersburg, we all expected him to take the full-time starters role. Well, unfortunately that wasn’t the case.
For the first four games of the KHL season, Zavragin sat out. He did not step foot on the ice and instead, was caught in an oh-so-familiar three-goalie rotation with two other young netminders. Zavragin is the youngest of the bunch at 20 years old (the others are 21 and 22 years old), but he clearly has the most hefty resume. We were all concerned that this was yet another time where some KHL coaching staff and management decided to screw over a young promising player that might have eyes on the NHL. That worry only tripled as Zavragin made an appearance down in the VHL (Russia’s second division) on Sept. 17, which he did stop 27 of 28 shots and earned a 2-1 win for SKA’s minor league team.
Thankfully, that worry only lasted a couple more days. On Sept. 19, Zavragin made his KHL season debut in a game against Dinamo Minsk and he absolutely shut the door. He allowed just two goals on 36 shots and earned a tidy 3-2 win — former Lehigh Valley Phantoms defenseman Brennan Menell (for all of 18 games) actually earned an assist for Zavragin’s SKA, but that’s beside the point.
And it wasn’t just a one-and-done opportunity either. For the very next game on Sept 21, Zavragin stonewalled a poor Laga team and got a 29-save shutout in just his second start of the season. All last season, the 20-year-old Flyers prospect earned just three shutouts for St. Petersburg and he’s already well on his way to beating that total.
What the future might hold for Zavragin this season
Now with two games under his belt and clearly in a dominating kind of mood with a wild .969 save percentage and 0.99 goals against average to start his season, we would assume that he would take many more of the starts for the rest of the year. But he does face some tough competition.
Artemi Pleshkov, an undrafted 5-foot-10 netminder, made three of the other four starts for SKA this season and came in relief when the third goaltender, Columbus Blue Jackets prospect Sergei Ivanov, gave up six goals on 20 shots in his lone start. Pleshkov so far has a .948 save percentage and 1.73 goals against average through those four appearances so he is certainly deserving of some foothold in the rotation, but selfishly, we of course want as many appearances as possible for Zavragin.
At least now there is no denying that Zavragin should be getting at the very least a 50-50 split of the starts until he strings together some bad performances, which would be out of the ordinary anyways.
After putting up historic numbers for a 19-year-old netminder in the KHL last season, Zavragin is looking to continue to do that this season. The best over Under-21 goaltending performance in the KHL came back in the 2015-16 season when Ilya Sorokin had a .953 save percentage and 1.06 goals against average in 28 games. Can Zavragin do that? Maybe not, but you don’t have to look too far down the list to see some realistic goals for the young Flyers prospect.
Maybe we can hope that SKA St. Petersburg mess with his ice-time so much that he wants out of his contract a year early, as he is slated to be free to come over to North America after the 2026-27 season. But that’s probably dreaming a little bit.
