The KHL championship play-offs start on Thursday

The Fonbet playoffs of the KHL championship starting on Thursday are noteworthy for two reasons. One is its new format, which mixes clubs from the Western and Eastern Conferences from the second round. The second – the main one – is in the unusual instability of the alignments before the start of the Gagarin Cup.

This play-off promises to turn into quite an exciting attraction for those who are partial to domestic hockey. Partly because they will now have to get used to the new format of the cup stage, which greatly complicates the visualization of the tournament bracket. Previously, right up to the finals, that is, at three stages, the fight was carried out exclusively within conferences. Now this only happens in the starting round. In the next conference, they “crossbreed” after dividing the survivors into two groups – “Western” and “Eastern”, in each of which a new crop is formed. Representatives of these groups are pitted against each other.

But adjustments to the system are, of course, not the most important reason that makes us characterize the upcoming playoffs as very special. The other one is more important.

Summing up the results of the regular season that ended on Monday, it was customary to remember 2014. Then, as now, the regular season was won by Dynamo, and in the interval between its two ups, the Continental Cup went exclusively to either SKA or CSKA. That is, a stable trend was broken. But something else is more interesting.

During these ten years, the Gagarin Cup was won by different clubs – in addition to the two army clubs, Metallurg, Ak Bars, and Avangard. Moreover, any of these victories looked terribly logical. I wanted to point my finger at the victor in advance as a sure contender for the Gagarin Cup. Not the only faithful one, but one of a very narrow group of faithful ones, literally two or three teams that acquired such status due to a happy coincidence of significant circumstances and factors – such as the strength of the roster, background, dynamics in the regular season.

This season, no matter how hard you try, you cannot single out a tiny elite squad.

It’s easy to find fault with almost every club that is perceived as a favorite because of the sonority of the brand or indicators, and to find reasons for restraint in forecasts. Well, or vice versa – in each of those whom it is convenient to find fault with, who modestly held on to the regular championship, it is easy to find reasons to think that everything can still turn out well for him.

There are practically no exceptions. The somewhat boring Ak Bars finished fourth in the East, having been eliminated in the first round by Avtomobilist, which was roughly the same in style and productivity, but in the new KHL “power index” it is still second in the conference, and this doesn’t hurt the eye too much. After all, when a team has such a chic set of celebrities with enormous experience – Alexander Radulov, Vadim Shipachev, Vyacheslav Voinov, Dmitry Yashkin – an explosion can be expected from it at any moment. CSKA completely failed in the regular season, ending up in the bottom half of the “Western” eight. However, this is still the same CSKA that won the Gagarin Cup in 2022 and 2023 – the same players, the same coach Sergei Fedorov, the same playing accents, which for some reason did not work well for several months. What if they make money in the playoffs? This has happened many times in hockey. And certainly the fans of Lokomotiv, which was much more stable in the regular season, did not jump for joy when they learned that their club would have to test for themselves the correctness of the version that the undoubted army potential would be revealed in all its glory when they were already retreating nowhere.

And everyone who finds themselves in the table above these unlucky giants literally gives reasons for doubt.

Metallurg, the leader of the East, was good, but it’s somehow strange to confidently bet on a club that has literally no stars, and whose most productive forward, Danila Yurov, is only 20 years old. Avangard, which has lagged behind Magnitogorsk, is too dependent on the strike team, and the opponents have studied the habits of sniper Reed Boucher and his partners inside and out. Spartak, which at one time fought for the top line in the Western classification, showed hockey sparkling with speed and ideas, suffered too many breakdowns at the end of the winter. “Torpedo”, which was also incredibly interesting recently, during the same period completely slid down at hurricane speed. SKA, on the contrary, was powerful in winter, corresponding to the rank of a giant, but we must remember that before the New Year, little went well for him. And also about the tradition that has developed in recent years among St. Petersburg residents, no matter what their tone, always stumble in the semifinals against CSKA.

Dynamo’s breakthrough looked amazing from the outside. Nevertheless, this is not an indisputable case from the point of view of prospects in the playoffs – if only because it looks like magic. It’s like magic and God knows how many breaths of Nikita Gusev, who was kicked out of SKA in the spring, considered ballast, and who in the last regular season set the KHL scoring record, scoring a crazy 89 points, and the sudden 30 goals of the hitherto ordinary forward Jordan Weal , and phenomenal, over 30 percent, efficiency in implementing the majority. And miracles, as we know, tend to dissolve in cup fights, which bring other class ingredients to the forefront – combativeness and discipline.

Alexey Dospehov