Flyers 2016 first-round pick German Rubtsov made his Kontinental Hockey League regular season debut on Friday for Vityaz in a 3-2 loss to Avangard Omsk. He only received five shifts and 3:20 of ice time, however.

It's only one game, of course. The long term always needs to be the focus, and hopefully Rubtsov's ice time increases significantly as the season rolls along. However, it would be a very optimistic prediction to forecast that Rubtsov is going to see any significant KHL ice time within the few months (if at all in his rookie season).

Herein lies some of the frustration that sometimes arises with the traditional handling of young players in the KHL. The 18-year-old Rubtsov got outmuscled defensively on the second Avangard goal by 6-foot-3, 200-plus pound veteran KHL winger Anton Burdasov (clip below). Rubtsov, who had finished serving a hooking penalty and was out on the next shift, was benched for the rest of the game.



Part of the development equation is putting players in position to succeed. Another piece is, once it is decided that a young player is ready for bigger challenges, to let him make and learn from his mistakes so that the player into a situation where he plays in fear of messing up.

As a rule of thumb, Swedish and Finnish teams tend to handle prospect development better than Russian and Czech teams in knowing how to pace their development, how to split their games for the junior and senior teams and having a sense of when the player is ready to handle a little more ice time and responsibility after they get their feet wet with the senior team.

On the bright side, Vityaz is one of the better KHL organizations in terms of bringing along younger players over the course of the season. It is going to be interesting to see how Rubtsov is brought along as a rookie as the year progresses.

Another Flyers-affiliated Russian prospect Mikhail Vorobyov, barely got any KHL playing time last year in 28 games but has averaged 13:24 over his first two games of the 2016-17 regular season so far for Salavat Yulaev Ufa. On Friday, in a 4-3 shootout loss to Avtomobilist Yekaterinburg, Vorobyov scored his first goal of the season. On the power play, Vorobyov snapped a left circle shot from near the hash marks into the net to tie the game at 1-1.

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