Dynamo beat CSKA as the winner of the regular championship

The regular Fonbet championship of the KHL championship ended with two important matches. Metallurg, having beaten Avangard 3:1, did not allow it to take away its leadership in the Eastern Conference. And in a dramatic meeting between two capital giants, Dynamo, the best regular-season club, prevailed – 4:3 in overtime – over CSKA, which looked surprisingly mediocre. He, however, still avoided getting hit by the most important opponent – SKA – already in the starting round of the play-offs.

The final chord of this regular KHL championship was the match, as if emphasizing all its originality. “Dynamo” entered him as the winner of the tournament, the winner of the Continental Cup: his status was ensured by the unexpected defeat of his only competitor, SKA, from Kunlun Red Star the day before. And his success in the regular season was already a noticeable event. The previous time Dynamo won it was in 2014. And since then, for almost a whole decade, the first “seeding” in the playoffs went to one of the two army clubs that turned into dominant giants – either SKA or CSKA. Their hegemony was interrupted by a team that has already surprised a lot this season: and by the famous forward Nikita Gusev, who was kicked out by St. Petersburg’s pursuer, who, having found himself in Dynamo, suddenly experienced a career peak and broke the regular championship scoring record of 85 points of Sergei Mozyakin, which had held for seven years, and the efficiency of the majority, which is amazing even by NHL standards – 30%.

CSKA entered this meeting as, apparently, the main loser of the regular season. Winner of the Gagarin Cup both last season and the season before last, who retained the golden squad, who, despite international sanctions, returned goaltender Ivan Fedotov, who never left for the NHL, he has behaved amazingly modestly for the entire six months since the start of the season, like some kind of average player, who absolutely does not know how to play against elite-level opponents, losing over and over again to both SKA and Dynamo.

As a result, it came to the point that in this match it was decided whether CSKA would have to fight with SKA, which had gained momentum, in the starting round of the play-offs for the umpteenth time, only now not in the semi-finals, but much earlier, or whether the opponent would be less resonant . And seventh place in the Western Conference and a date with the St. Petersburg team was not so dim for him in case of a misfire.

But when it was most needed, CSKA still pulled together. He digested the puck missed in the minority in the second period and responded with two of his own, from seasoned veterans Anton Slepyshev and Maxim Mamin, which resulted in Dynamo deletions. Mamin, however, formally distinguished himself in equal strength, but, in fact, Andrei Mironov had just jumped out of the penalty box and could only watch as the army forward deftly juggled the puck on his stick to send it into the net.

In the third twenty minutes, Konstantin Okulov increased CSKA’s lead. It seemed that the intrigue was killed. But Dynamo pampered the audience with a rare trick: long before the final siren, having earned the opportunity to convert the extra one, they replaced goalkeeper Maxim Motorygin with a sixth field player, leaving the goal empty. The experiment was not in vain. Soon the army team was left with just three against five opponents, and Dmitry Rashevsky reduced the Dynamo gap to a minimum. Then CSKA was helped out by attentive coaches who took a video challenge and canceled the goal of the home team’s forward Jordan Weale due to interference with the goalkeeper. But Dynamo still restored the balance, achieving overtime. True, the CSKA hockey players most likely already knew that everything terrible, that is, the rendezvous with SKA, was over for them due to the failure of Torpedo, located in the table below, against Lada. And Dynamo put the finishing touches on the army team in the extra period thanks to Wil’s magnificent pass.

In the first round of the play-offs starting on Thursday, CSKA will face stable Lokomotiv. In other Western pairs, Dynamo Moscow will be tormented by Minsk, and SKA will be tormented by the young, interesting, but Torpedo, which gave up at the end of the winter. Spartak, which had not been out of the fight for leadership in the conference for a long time, got bitten by Severstal.

Shortly before this match, the winner of the tournament in another conference and all the pairs of the eastern playoffs were determined. First place was retained by Metallurg, who beat their only competitor in the fight for the top line in the table, Avangard. The most curious thing is that, it seems, the people of Magnitogorsk didn’t really want to cling to it at all costs. They were missing almost a dozen core players, and the lion’s share of them were clearly not absent because they received injuries that were incompatible with their performance in an important match.

At the same time, this fact, oddly enough, did not particularly affect the game of Metallurg. And this version of it was distinguished by exceptional reliability and accuracy, signature Magnitogorsk qualities. “Avant-garde”, which just put up an almost combat option for the match and did not save, for example, either the best sniper of the regular season, Reed Boucher, who scored 44 goals in it, or Vladimir Tkachev, who was among the top five scorers, suffered throughout the entire match, and scored the only goal in the final period.

In the starting round of the play-offs, Amur will have to suffer with Metallurg, and with Avangard, which, of course, despite this misfire, still looks like a club ready to hunt for the Gagarin Cup, will be Lada. The two eastern pairs seem much more evenly matched. “Salavat Yulaev” will play with “Traktor”, and “Ak Bars”, quiet in the regular season, despite a whole squad of seasoned stars like Alexander Radulov, Dmitry Yashkin, Vyacheslav Voinov, Vadim Shipachev, will play with the strong “Avtomobilist”.

At the same time, you need to remember about the current playoffs that it will be held in an adjusted format. The adjustments to the starting round do not apply: here the fight will be fought, as usual, within conferences. But in the next year, a system is introduced, which is called crossover: Western clubs will collide with Eastern ones.

Alexey Dospehov