| Anton Silayev | Chaika Nizhny Novgorod | MHL | R | D | 6’6″ | 202 | Sarov, RUS | 2006 | 2023-2024: B |
Game Grade: C+
Comments: This was a much better performance than Neutral Zone NHL has seen out of Silayev in recent weeks but there are still a lot of problems with his game. Silayev’s skating and passing games were much better than normal tonight. He showed off some agile skating and is able to change directions very quickly due to good edgework. He showed off on the rush tonight, taking the puck long distances multiple times and helped set up in the OZ. He flew up ice with speed and made a couple of nice reads to change lanes and use the width of the ice to make progress into the OZ. Silayev’s passing game was better than normal but there were still some rough decisions that made me worried about his potential. He made a ton of great breakout passes that pushed play up ice but a majority of them were to the first available player in front of him. He made some bad reads on when his teammate was going to cut and over/under passed many times. He threw a dangerous buddy pass to his teammate in the NZ who barely got out of the way of the hit. If any pressure is applied to Silayev when he has the puck you can very easily predict the turnover that is about to happen. He either throws it away without looking or is easily bumped off of the puck. We understand he is still very young and playing against grown men but he has had a ton of time to become more comfortable at this level and has not improved his ability to escape forechecking at all. A majority of Silayev’s shots come from the point and they are inconsistent in their quality. He either fires a heavy shot or an absolute muffin that wobbles in the air on its way to an easy save. Defensively, Anton looked a bit more comfortable than normal but still made a majority of the errors that have caused concern all year. He steps up on just about every rush attempt and gets burned 70% of the time. There were way too many times in this game when we wrote down ‘bad step up in NZ and rush blows past him’ next to #21. He gets burned on nearly every rush and leaves his partner in terrible spots. He was more positionally sound in the DZ than normal but is still drawn out miles away from the cage to pressure pucks that he has no business going after. After this game we feel a bit more comfortable rating Silayev mid to late first but there are still so many problems that have me questioning the hype. Although this was a better game than normal, it was against one of the worst teams in the league and he did not show that much improvement. Neutral Zone understands that a lot of his troubles come due to his lack of strength against grown men but he has not improved much since the start of this year. We are a bit worried a lot of his ratings have been based on the potential of having a 6’7″ defenseman in your pool but at this point he seems like a real developmental project to us. We might be eating these words in a few years but we would not draft Silayev earlier than late first round.
Scout: Henry Lawrence