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Will Flyers draft Russian? There is risk involved

If Craig Button's ability to predict the future is to be trusted, the Flyers and their general manager, Ron Hextall, will face an interesting decision when it comes time for them to make the No. 7 overall pick in next month's NHL draft.

If Craig Button's ability to predict the future is to be trusted, the Flyers and their general manager, Ron Hextall, will face an interesting decision when it comes time for them to make the No. 7 overall pick in next month's NHL draft.

Button used to the GM of the Calgary Flames, and he's the director of scouting for TSN, Canada's answer to ESPN. He knows his stuff, and according to his latest mock draft, the Flyers will have the opportunity to select an 18-year-old defenseman named Ivan Provorov, who spent the 2014-15 season with the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League. Provorov is 6 feet tall, weighs 191 pounds, and skates and sees the game so well that he collected 61 points in 60 games for Brandon.

He is also from Yaroslavl, Russia, and based on something Hextall said before last year's draft, Provorov's heritage is likely to give Hextall and the Flyers pause when weighing whether to pick him.

The source of Hextall's caution wouldn't be an antiquated and stereotypical prejudice against Russian players - an attitude that isn't fair to affix to the Flyers anymore - but pure pragmatism.

Over the last half-decade, the Kontinental Hockey League in Russia has positioned itself as a viable competitor with and alternative to the NHL. During the 2013-14 season, 188 former NHL players skated for KHL teams, according to a survey conducted by TheHockeyWriters.com, a hockey news service based in Quebec, and before Hextall or any NHL executive drafts any Russian player, he has to be certain that the player won't decide to return home.

"You put it into the thought process - yes, you do," Hextall said. "You get a North American, you pretty much know he's going to come here and stay here. With a Russian, you're not a hundred percent sure. I wouldn't hesitate to draft a Russian, but you have to factor in the fact that he may go to the KHL. It's a real factor for sure. . . .

"It's different because you used to just not know if a Russian player would come over. Now it's more a lot of them come over, but are they going to leave? If it didn't come into your thinking, I don't think you're being thorough."

If the KHL once could have been dismissed as irrelevant when it came to attracting talent that was comparable to the NHL's, everything changed in July 2013. That month, Ilya Kovalchuk - who had scored 417 goals over his 11 seasons in the NHL, who had played in his first Stanley Cup Finals the year before, and who had 12 years and $77 million remaining on his contract with the New Jersey Devils - "retired" from the Devils and accepted a four-year contract to play for SKA St. Petersburg in the KHL.

"In professional sports, when I was growing up in the '70s, there was competition," an NHL agent said in the immediate aftermath of Kovalchuk's departure. "There was the WHA in hockey, the ABA in basketball, the USFL in football. This is a unique situation because it's competition, and it's competition on a global scale. Here you have the highest-paid guy in the NHL, and he leaves. There is certainly a natural competition there."

For Kovalchuk, the competition was also economic, and the KHL had the advantage in it. Over his next four years with the Devils, he was scheduled to earn $46 million but would have had to pay $23.45 million of it in federal and state taxes. Because Russia has a 13 percent flat tax, Kovalchuk would have had to sign a contract with SKA St. Petersburg that paid him just $6.6 million annually (in American dollars) to equal what he would have made in the NHL.

Beyond the money, though, Kovalchuk had returned to Russia during the 2012-13 NHL lockout, scoring 42 points in 36 games for SKA St. Petersburg over that period, and the pull of his homeland had played a powerful role in his decision. That kind of ethnic-based affection was a consideration for the Flyers last year when they drafted Russian left wing Radel Fazleev. Fazleev had been a first-round pick in the 2013 KHL draft, but he came over to North America to play for the Calgary Hitmen of the WHL and stayed with them for the 2014-15 season, scoring 18 goals in 71 regular-season games.

When asked if the Flyers would have drafted Fazleev if he hadn't already been in North America, Chris Pryor, their director of scouting, told reporters, "It's a tough question." But Provorov is already on this continent, too, and he doesn't seem to have much desire to return to Russia.

"He could have played in the KHL this year," said Tom Kowal, who coached Provorov with the Wilkes-Barre Knights of the Atlantic Youth Hockey League. "He came to America to play in the NHL." The question may be academic, anyway. Craig Button has them passing on Provorov and drafting Mikko Rantanen, a forward from Finland.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski