Dinamo Riga - Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, game preview

Yaroslavl Lokomotiv - Dinamo Riga

03.12.08

Tomorrow Dinamo Riga will face a tough opponent from Yaroslavl, they have a really talented team built up for this season. As KHL official salary table shows, Yaroslavl Lokomotiv had all the money to build up a great team for this season, they had 19.800.000$ for this season to spend on player salaries.

Short Yaroslavl Lokomotiv History

Yaroslavl Lokomotiv played generally in the Second League of the Class "A" group during the Soviet era, being promoted to the First League of Class "A" for the 1983-1984 season. Known as Torpedo Yaroslavl at that time, the team enjoyed moderate success under head coach Sergei Alekseyevich Nikolaev. Never a powerful club during the Soviet era, the team became a consistent winner during the 1990s, and won their first league championship in 1997 under coach Petr Vorobev. The club moved from Avtodizel Arena to the new Arena 2000 early in the 2001-2002 season, and won consecutive league championships in 2002 and 2003 under Czech head coach Vladimir Vujtek, Sr. Vujtek left the club after the 2002-03 season for a lucrative contract offer from rival Ak Bars Kazan. Lokomotiv have not been able to replicate their success since that time, but remain a perennial contender in the Russian Super League.

Top Players

Of course one of the top players are former NHL star Aleksei Yashin with 22 points(10+12), defender Aleksander Guskov 22(9+13), forward Aleksei Kudashov with 20 points(7+13) and Czech forward Irgl Zbynek with 19 points(10+9). Also worth mentioning is Vitaly Vishnevsky who has played more then 550 games in NHL and Josef Vasicek who had totaled 460 games in NHL, he was most notable with his great offensive play in Carolina Hurricanes. Their first goalkeeper is Georgi Gelashvili, he has 93.8% save percentage, which is really great for a goalkeeper. If you want to know more about player statistics, visit here.

Overall perfomance

This season Yaroslavl Lokomative are doing really well, they are currently in 5h possition, with 17 wins in 30 games, they are short 11 points from first place, they are averaging 3.0 goals for and 1.8 goals against. Overall they are showing that they have one of the best defence in whole league and also they have people who can score, basicaly they are solid balanced team.

Prediction

Tomorrow we will play most likley with Sergejs Naumovs, because Martin Prusek got minor injury from the last game and he missed out yesterdays training because of that, I think that Prusek will sit on the bench tomorrow. Recently Dinamo Riga are playing really good, mostly because of Martin Prusek, who concerned in last few games avarege 1 puck in a game. In my opinion tomorrow game will be really hard for Dinamo Riga, Yaroslavl will be putting a great pressure on Dinamo Riga. As I stated earlier, Dinamo Riga can lose to anyone and they at the same time win anyone, unpredictable team. Game review will be tomorrow right after the game, stay tuned.

Here you will find live video feed to the game tomorrow, it will show up few hours before the game.

Also live video feed for todays Dinamo Riga - Yaroslavl Lokomotiv game you can find here.