The NHL and the KHL spent a good chunk of the summer reportedly discussing a player transfer agreement between the two leagues, but nothing came of it this year.

The KHL is still working desperately to retain young talent, though — so they’re working on the creation of a U18 National Development Team in Russia, which will compete in the MHL (a junior hockey league in Eastern Europe and Russia) and the IIHF U18 World Junior Championships. The conceptual team, set to begin operating in the 2015-2016 season, will loosely model itself after the U18 National Development Team in the United States.

Like the US National Development team, the KHL — working with Russian president Vladimir Putin — hopes that the Russian Development Team will serve to begin development and teamwork among junior-level Russian skaters who project to be members of the Men’s National Team down the line. Per the MHL/KHL’s official joint release:

“Along with Vitaly Prokhorov we’ve begun working on the project and presented president Vladimir Putin with it and he has approved it, says Rashid Nurgaliev, Chairman Of Trustees Board of Hockey Russia. The goal of the program is to create an effective development system for Team Russia. A brand new hockey club will be created for 16 and 17-year-old players. I believe, that in the end this project will diminish the amount of junior players leaving the country. We expect to invite up to 30 players to the team every season.”

As mentioned above, the idea behind the creation of a top-tier development club — in theory — would be to retain some of the talent Russia has seen depart for the CHL in recent seasons. It’s part of the search for a solution to the talent exodus Russia has seen from their hockey programs that’s resulted in the current decline of the KHL; with young Russian talent opting more and more often to develop in North American junior leagues, the nation has been struggling to find a way to retain their best players for any period of time at all.

Although the Development Team is a fantastic idea — and worth it’s weight in gold if the KHL can truly get it off the ground — the idea that it can hold on to talent in Russia seems somewhat suspect.

The KHL, like the SHL, SM-liiga, and most other European hockey leagues, is structured with junior affiliates for teams developing directly under their parents clubs. As a result, a good number of the NHL skaters who developed in Russia — excluding the ones who opt for CHL, USHL, or NCAA development once they hit their late teens — spend at least some time skating for the parent KHL club they developed under once they hit a certain age. With no Men’s National Team competing year-round in Russia for the development team to feed into, the skaters who opt for the U18 NDP route in Russia will still be left with a two-year window in which they’d have the opportunity to play in the CHL — and they’ll still have anywhere from a four to six year window in which they’d be eligible to compete in the NCAA in the United States.

Likely, the KHL won’t see true talent retention for homegrown players until a player loan agreement is put in place between the national league and the NHL. With a huge gap still existent between the age most players would likely hit the NHL and the age cutoff for a U18 development program, there’s still a window of time where the Russian teams will theoretically lose some of their best players.

Looking beyond the immediate impact, though, the KHL insists that adding a development team will give them a chance to better develop the players they do have in Russia from an early age, unifying the development structure for homegrown talent and providing those who do stay in the KHL with a higher quality of competition. This means that while the impact may not be immediately noticeable, the structural foundation of the KHL should start to see some improvement from a talent standpoint alone — and that’s certainly a step in the right direction.