We’re still more than a month away from seeing the Flyers and their North American prospects getting back on the ice, so the happenings worth recapping around here are pretty few and far between, but the bits of prospect action that have been going on have been pretty overwhelmingly positive.
Case in point: Ilya Pautov, who’s just been getting back into action as the preseason over in the MHL with Krasnaya Armiya is kicking off. Now, you may remember, a couple of weeks back, we spoke about him in some detail, breaking down some of the particulars of his game and noting how there might well be some interesting potential in this prospect who’s flown under the radar a bit, and in the time since, Pautov has done an excellent job in backing up that assertion. He’s been on a real tear throughout the first two weeks of exhibition game play — he had one two-goal game to kick things off, and he tacked on another (and added an assist as well) over the weekend.
We see his pair of goals here, and there’s a lot to like in the plays leading up to them — Pautov has shown that he can play with real pace, and both the speed of his release and the accuracy of his shot has been giving these opposing goaltenders fits.
Now, this is where we might normally add a disclaimer about how these are just preseason games, and it’s too early to be drawing any real conclusions, or making any real predictions about what this means for Pautov’s regular season production, all that jazz, and while all of that is still true, it doesn’t mean we can’t still be excited to see a prospect who, up until this point, has been something of an unknown to most of us, starting to pop off. Pautov still has about two weeks left in this preseason to continue to make an impression before the proper regular season opens up and things start to really matter, but he’s been off to a pretty eye-catching start.
