As players advance up the ranks, their skills scale downward. One's standout skills in junior condense towards the mean as the talent pool compresses with each step up hockey's ladder.

The above-average but not necessarily elite puck skills that inform a player's value fade into the background, and safer, sometimes panicked plays take their stead. Defensive defenders turn to defensive liabilities without significant improvement. The increased pace and superior decision-making of their opponents expose the cracks in their armour.

Just don’t tell Alexander Romanov that.

Romanov went from a solid if unspectacular defender in the MHL to an excellent one in the KHL. And despite the KHL’s, let’s say, tricky relationship with young players coupled with an absence of skilled puck-moving defenders, Ro