Maple Leafs select winger Alexander Plesovskikh with 152nd overall pick of 2024 NHL Draft
By Alex Hobson
4 days agoThe Toronto Maple Leafs have selected forward Alexander Plesovskikh from Mamonty Ugry of the MHL, Russia’s junior league with the 152nd pick of the 2024 NHL Draft.
It was their first of three picks in the fifth round of the draft, selecting Czechia-born forward Miroslav Holinka with the 151st pick and Russian goaltender Timofei Obvintsev with the 157th pick.
A native of Tyumen, Russia, Plesovskikh recorded 17 points in 33 games for Mamonty Ugry. He is going to stay in the MHL next season but will be suiting up for a different team in MHK Spartak Moskva.
Standing at 6-foot-2 and 174 pounds, Plesovskikh is a right-handed winger who likes to play on the left side, and was ranked 95th out of all European skaters on NHL’s Central Scouting rankings. Here’s what EliteProspects’ draft guide had to say about him.
“One of the youngest players in the draft, Alexander Plesovskikh probably has more runway ahead of him to push and develop his skills than most players in the class. He’s going to need it too, based on what we saw this season. More of a straight-line pursuer than a creator, he mostly spent the year taking advantage of the opposition’s mistakes, pouncing on loose pucks and intercepting them to then drive the slot. One can be an opportunistic scorer at the MHL level, where mistakes are plentiful, but not at the professional level.”
Plesovskikh will undoubtedly be a project pick for the Maple Leafs, who have been known to dabble into the occasional unknown Russian in the past, but for every Nikolai Chebykin (let’s see who remembers that name), there’s a Nikita Grebyonkin who displays signs of a future NHLer in the years following the draft. The fact that he’s returning for another junior season says a lot about how far away he is from the NHL, but in the later rounds, it’s all about taking shots in the dark.
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