EAST LANSING, Mich. — “Is it common for him to be out that late?”
That’s the first question Michigan State head coach Adam Nightingale was asked about Artyom Levshunov, still skating while most of his teammates were long gone, after a recent practice.
“Yeah,” Nightingale answered. “I mean, he’s a worker. Sometimes you actually have to pull him back. You can tell he’s super committed, with where he’s come from.”
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Levshunov is the third-youngest player in college hockey and is in the midst of a point-per-game freshman season which, if it holds, will go down as one of the most productive in NCAA history for an 18-year-old defenseman. He was picked second by the Chicago Blackhawks at the 2024 NHL Draft, the first defenseman selected. He was the first player from Belarus to accomplish each feat, besting Ruslan Salei (No. 9 to Anaheim in 1996) and Andrei Kostitsyn (No. 10 to Montreal in 2003).
The more you learn about him, his game, his story and where he’s come from, the more sense it all makes.
MSU senior and captain Nash Nienhuis has stretched, showered and found a seat in the stands at Munn Ice Arena after practice.
Below him, Levshunov is among the few players who still linger on the ice. As others head to class, he remains more than half an hour after practice, weaving through the neutral zone, shoulder-faking across the blue line and taking one-timers from sophomore Matt Basgall.
When Levshunov notices Nienhuis watching, he straightens up, cracks a smile and waves cheekily.
Nienhuis was the “no-brainer” pick to lead the Spartans and partner with Levshunov, or “Arty” as he’s called around Munn. The Belarusian is in his second season in North America. Nienhuis is a soon-to-be 24-year-old senior.
It’s Nienhuis’ job to support Levshunov as much off the ice as he does on it, something Nightingale calls “a big responsibility.”
“He loves to ask me for help in school,” Nienhuis says, waving back at him and laughing, “but that’s all right, I’ll help him out.”
It won’t be long before their careers head down different paths, though.
Nienhuis, the son of Kraig, a former NHLer who represented Austria internationally after playing there, is pursuing Austrian citizenship so he can potentially play there too after graduating.
Levshunov, meanwhile, will someday have his photo added to those of the NHL alumni displayed on screens and walls around Munn.
When Nienhuis talks about his D partner, he shakes his head as if in disbelief of both what he’s doing — living and attending school, with a major language barrier, in a town in Michigan halfway around the world from his home — and what he’s capable of on the ice.
“He’s a crazy talent. You can see his raw ability out there. He’s an unbelievable skater. … He’s got a ton of offensive capability but defensively he’s also got a great stick and a high hockey IQ. He’s got all of the tools,” Nienhuis says. “And he’s a great kid.”
It’s just before 3 p.m. and Levshunov is sitting inside the offices atop the players’ facilities at Munn shortly before sprinting out late to a class.
He’s seated, but his chest and arms pop out of his workout gear, his head shaved. When he stands, his giant running shoes and long legs further highlight his imposing size.
When you ask his coaches or teammates about it — the unspoken first impression his physique gives off — they laugh or gasp.
“You mean he’s jacked?” jokes assistant coach Mike Towns. “When we first started going down this road, the physical maturity was a concern of ours — this 17-year-old D. And that hasn’t been an issue at all. He sort of has this force field around him where when guys bump into him they fall down.”
Junior Red Savage, who has just passed by him in the hall, says his size was the first thing he noticed about him.
“It’s insane,” Savage says. “I’ve never seen an 18-year-old that big. He’s just a big ball of muscle. He doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him. And he doesn’t understand how big he is sometimes. He’ll just wreck someone in practice without even knowing and just start laughing at the guy.”
Associate head coach Jared DeMichiel says NHL teams have even asked: “Is he really his age?”
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“Physically, he’s daunting and he can be intimidating,” DeMichiel says. “But then you talk to him and he’s very much like a kid who just turned 18.”
Will Morlock, the Spartans’ head of athletic performance and a longtime strength and conditioning coach at GVN — the gym that trains players at the NTDP and NHLers like the Hughes brothers, Mark Scheifele and Dylan Larkin — says he did a double-take the first time Levshunov walked into his gym.
Then, when the Spartans ran off-ice testing, Levshunov wasn’t just faster than anybody on the team, but faster than all of Morlock’s clients other than Luke Hughes. That translates on the ice, too. Towns calls him an “elite, elite skater” who from goal line to goal line is “faster than anybody” at MSU.
“He’s a guy who eats, sleeps, breathes it,” Morlock says. “Every single thing that he can do to maximize his potential he’s doing. And it’s not just for show (his physique). He’s incredibly strong, he’s incredibly explosive, he’s durable, he’s mobile.”
Today, Levshunov’s late because he has just spent too much time in the gym (for the second time today, after getting a lift in before the skate). When the other players were done with their upper-body exercises, Levshunov lingered for another hour.
Staff call it “Arty Time” — their catchphrase for a kid who beats to his own drum.
“What’s most impressive is the stuff that doesn’t get noticed or isn’t sexy like doing a bunch of squats or curls,” Morlock says. “You’ll see the body and how strong he is but the details are probably even more uncommon, especially as a teenager to want to stay after and do that when your buddies are off doing something else.”
The first time Maxim Strbak saw Levshunov play, he had no idea who he was, let alone that they’d become teammates at MSU. Strbak was still playing for the Sioux Falls Stampede and had stopped by the rink Levshunov’s Green Bay Gamblers were playing on at the USHL’s Fall Classic.
The first thing he noticed was that Levshunov was still wearing a cage, a sign of his age. Then he scored his first USHL goal and Strbak thought to himself, “Who is this guy?”
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A little less than a year later, when Strbak showed up on campus in East Lansing, he still didn’t know they were going to be teammates until he ran into him at Munn.
In the months since, they’ve attended classes together. Strbak, a Slovak who just went through the draft process as an import defenseman himself (he was selected by the Buffalo Sabres in the second round of the 2023 draft), can relate to what he’s going through. He’s also in awe of how good he is at his age.
So are the rest of his teammates.
“I mean, I love him. He cracks me up. And I just think about myself at 17 years old versus him, how much more mature he is than I was, physically and mentally,” says alternate captain Karsen Dorwart.
Ask fifth-year forward Nico Muller about him and he says, “Wow, wow, wow.”
“When you see him in practice every day, the raw talent that there is, I’ve never seen anything like it. Body type, he’s NHL-ready already,” Muller says.
Savage, who lived with him for a couple of weeks in the summer, knew nothing about him until “he came in with this massive smile and broken English having the time of his life.”
“It has been pretty cool kind of reliving the first couple of years of college through him … just seeing how young he is but how mature he is at the same time,” Savage says. “He’s at the rink from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. pretty much every day, which is insane. He’s got more drive than anyone else on the team.
“He’s also got the soft skill to his game which not a lot of big defensemen have and you can tell because he just works on it every day — his skating, his stickhandling and shooting pucks. It’s pretty inspiring to see.”
Michael Leone’s introduction to Levshunov was a text from his agent, Dan Milstein of Gold Star Hockey.
“I want to give you the best defenseman in the 2024 draft,” the message read.
“OK, this is just an agent talking,” Leone, the general manager and head coach of the Gamblers, thought to himself.
Then he sat down to watch Levshunov play and his tone changed.
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“Oh my God, this kid is unbelievable,” he thought after that first sitting, a smattering of games with Belarus’ U18 and U20 teams.
He extended Levshunov an invite to camp, still unsure if he would get a visa and if they could roster him (that is, if he was even good enough to make the team).
By the end of camp, Leone, who’d spent three seasons at USA Hockey’s national program as an assistant coach, working directly with the top 2003, 2004 and 2005-born American stars and coaching more than a dozen first-round picks (including top-10 selections like Luke Hughes, Logan Cooley and Will Smith), already believed Levshunov was “the most gifted player (he’d) ever worked with.”
By season’s end, he was sure of it.
“Luke Hughes is an unbelievable talent, but I think Arty has more upside just because of his size,” Leone told The Athletic last April, still unsure if Levshunov would return for a second season in Green Bay or make the jump to college. “This kid is like 6-foot-3, 215 (pounds) and the complete package. The games where he and (Macklin) Celebrini played against each other, it was awesome and both of them were the best players on the ice and you’re like, ‘This is so good for our league.’”
After starting him in a sheltered role, Leone found himself doing everything he could to get him more minutes as the year went on. Though Levshunov didn’t start on the penalty kill, he finished as Leone’s best penalty killer and a top shot blocker. Though he posted 13 goals and 42 points in 62 games (both of which are among the most by an under-18 defenseman in the league’s history) and was named to the USHL’s All-Rookie Team and Third All-Star Team, Leone guesses he hit 15 posts.
“He could have 20 goals, no question,” Leone said. “He just had to get used to the North American game and his responsibilities in his own zone. And you can see it now. Like he has the ability to be an elite defender.”
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When Leone talks about him, he, too, is in disbelief.
“This kid’s a top-five pick, no brainer. He’s special. And he’s not even close to his ceiling I don’t think, which is crazy,” Leone said. “He’s a legit No. 1 in the NHL. Some of the stuff he does is incredible. If you wanted to take a defenseman, you could argue you could take him at No. 1 or No. 2 depending on what your organizational needs are. I knew he was good but I just had no idea. It’s amazing. And it’s unheard of out of Belarus.”
Back inside a conference room at Munn, Levshunov’s smile only leaves his face for two reasons.
When he’s thinking, his eyes shifting from side to side as he tries to get the words out in his still-foreign second language.
And when he talks about what he left behind to pursue his dream.
It has been two years since his dad died of heart complications from COVID-19.
It has been over a year since he left his mom, Inna (an engineer), and brother, Kirill (a hockey coach), at home in Zhlobin, a town of a little less than 80,000 on the Dnieper River in Belarus. He hasn’t been back to Belarus, period, since he left in the summer of 2022 for Green Bay.
He spent the summer between hockey seasons training in Florida with Belarusian skills coach Kirill Metlyuk, an alum of Metallurg Zhlobin, the pro team he grew up watching on TV and going to games with his grandmother, Tatsiana. This summer, Inna and Kirill visited him in Florida for a week.
He admits he wanted to play in the CHL initially but couldn’t because of the league’s rules around accepting Russian/Belarusian import players due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Nightingale and his staff weren’t even sure they were getting his commitment until weeks before the players were set to show up on campus this summer.
All three of Nightingale, DeMichiel and Towns had seen him play, and everyone in college hockey wanted him, but he reached out to the list of schools he was considering at the last minute after finally ruling out a return to Green Bay (among other options).
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He says he didn’t even realize he was good — certainly not top-five-in-the-draft good, at least — until he began testing himself in the USHL.
He misses his family and calls his brother and mom almost daily.
“He’s got to make sure he’s focused on the right things because there’s a lot to a draft year with the interviews and people coming to watch him — and at a young age,” Nightingale says. “So it’s just being there to support him and know he’s not alone.”
A few weeks ago, when he turned 18, his teammates got him a cake and some balloons and took him to get hibachi for the first time to celebrate, something they called “a funny scene.”
He says he’s still trying to figure it all out — the people, the lifestyle and the hockey. After arriving in East Lansing from Florida, he spent the rest of his summer taking English classes “eight hours a day.”
“It’s still different hockey than I played in Belarus. It’s more physical in Belarus. Here, it’s faster. Different culture. Different people. Different language. I would say in Belarus people are more quiet than in America,” he explains of the transition. “But every player here wants to play in the best league in the world and that’s my dream too.”
Levshunov has been working closely with Melissa Tallant, the school’s assistant director of student-athlete support services, and a Russian learning assistant.
According to Towns, who oversees the players’ academics on the coaching staff, his writing and reading are behind but his grades are above average.
“We’re proud of him with coming out of his shell and doing well in school. His English is improving in chit-chatting and he learns new phrases and then brings them to us. He’s got some one-liners,” Towns says, chuckling.
Through it all, he has kept a positive attitude, too. It’s Levshunov who, after a loss, will walk into the gym and say to Morlock, “It’s life!”
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“You can tell he’s got a good head on his shoulders and he was raised really well,” Morlock says. “He’s very intentional about what he does, but he also always smiles.”
When he’s asked about his physique, that smile comes back.
“I mean, yeah,” he says, shrugging and looking down at his arms. “I have strength and good weight, and I feel confident when I go against guys.”
When he looks back on his journey to this point, he says he wouldn’t change the path he has taken now, crediting Leone and Nightingale for trusting in him and giving him lots of ice time.
With that ice time, he has taken off.
Says Nightingale: “He’s a really talented player, he’s a physical presence, he’s good with the puck, and he has an interest in defending which sometimes young, skilled D don’t always have that, which when you’re talking about him as a pro is a pretty special quality.”
And this is only the beginning.
“I try to put myself in his shoes, if I’m going over to Belarus never knowing their language at 16. He’s a pretty impressive young man,” DeMichiel says. “He puts a lot of work in. It’s not for show. There���s a ton of substance to it … he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get his game to the top level.”
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic. Photos courtesy of MSU Athletic Communications)
