It was a summer start for winter sports as the Opening Cup was played on August 24. The early start was planned to help Russia’s national team as it prepares to host the World Championship in Moscow and St. Petersburg in May.
But there was no evidence that an abrupt switch from beach holiday to training camp had disconcerted the players as SKA and CSKA produced a thrilling battle to inaugurate KHL Season #8. The teams had unfinished business after SKA’s dramatic fightback in the previous season’s playoffs, and CSKA claimed a measure of revenge when summer signing Geoff Platt grabbed the winning goal in the opening seconds of overtime, snapping a 3-3 tie and sending the first piece of silverware to Moscow. The capital was also the home of the month’s two other big stories. At Luzhniki on August 25, Spartak returned to KHL action after a one-year sabbatical due to financial problems. Swapping its old Sokolniki home for the arena vacated by Dynamo, Spartak began with an overtime win over Dinamo Minsk. Casey Wellman got the decisive goal after Igor Radulov forced a 3-3 tie late on. The next day it was Dynamo’s turn to mark a new beginning with its first game at the new VTB Arena, a future World Championship venue. Sibir was the visitor – and claimed the first goal on the new ice when Oleg Gubin opened the scoring in the sixth minute. In what was becoming a recurring theme of the start of the season, the game was tied at 3-3 going into overtime before Martins Karsums gave Dynamo the win.
Lokomotiv goalie Alexei Murygin hit the headlines by establishing a new KHL shut-out record. The former Metallurg Magnitogorsk and Amur man posted his fourth consecutive shut-out in a 3-0 win at Admiral on Sep. 27, going 266 minutes and 10 seconds without conceding a goal. That outstripped his predecessor between the piping in Yaroslavl, Curtis Sanford, who held the previous record of 237:33. Earlier in the month, Ak Bars played CSKA in the 5,000th KHL game – and the teams served up a nine-goal thriller to mark the occasion. Ak Bars went 2-0 in front, only to be pegged back by the Army Men. Oscar Moller snapped the 2-2 tie deep in the second stanza before two quick goals from Fyodor Malykhin and Justin Azevedo put Ak Bars in control early in the third. The teams traded two further goals – Alexander Radulov got his second of the night – as Ak Bars won it 6-3. There was also an individual milestone to celebrate: Dynamo Moscow’s double Gagarin Cup-winner Konstantin Gorovikov celebrated his 1,000th game in Russian hockey earlier that month. September 17 saw the first coaching casualty of the season: Lada’s Sergei Svetlov left the Togliatti team where he had been head coach since May 2014. Within a couple of weeks a more notable change happened in Ufa where Salavat Yulaev replaced Anatoly Yemelin with Igor Zakharkin following a 3-0 defeat at Vityaz on September 30. For Zakharkin, for so long the assistant to Vyacheslav Bykov in World Championship-winning campaigns with Russia and Gagarin Cup triumphs at SKA and Salavat Yulaev, this was a first crack at the head coach’s role; for Yemelin it was a return to the coaching staff after a disappointing start to the campaign. But Yemelin and Svetlov were only the start of this story: by the end of the season a record number of head coaches would leave their posts.
The month began and ended with two individual achievements. On October 5 Alexei Murygin’s shut-out sequence finally ended – just 3:45 before he could set an all-time Russian record. Roman Horak’s second-period goal for Vityaz Podolsk finally ended Murygin’s resistance, while Loko put together a 13-game winning streak that only came to an end on October 27 with a 2-1 loss at Traktor Chelyabinsk. All but one of those victories came in regulation time as Lokomotiv steamed to the top of the table. At the end of the month Sergei Mozyakin became only the third man in history to score 400 goals in top-flight Russian hockey. His memorable marker came at Torpedo on October 30, Magnitka’s second in a 4-2 victory. It also brought an end to an uncomfortable couple of weeks of anticipation after Mozyakin took his tally to 398 on Oct. 18. Two blanks followed, then a solitary marker against Amur. A mistaken report credited him with the first goal at Dinamo Minsk, adding to the confusion, but finally, at the fifth attempt, the milestone was achieved in Nizhny Novgorod.
“The closer you get to a milestone, the harder it is to get over the line,” Mozyakin told the Metallurg website. “Everyone knew about [the 400th goal], everyone was talking about it, both in the locker room and outside. I got a bit more nervous, there were many chances when the puck just wouldn’t go in the net.”
By the end of the season, Mozyakin had overtaken Vyacheslav Starshinov to become the second highest all-time goalscorer in Russian hockey, just a handful of goals behind record holder Boris Mikhailov. The coaching changes continued: SKA St. Petersburg and Metallurg Magnitogorsk announced new faces behind the bench within a few hours of each other on October 17. The departure of Andrei Nazarov from SKA after a turbulent few months was no great surprise: the combative former Severstal, Donbass and Barys boss began with a controversial spat with the club doctor and continued in his confrontational vein from then on. Without the results to back up his approach, the notoriously trigger-happy management at the defending champion wasted little time in pulling the plug. He was succeeded by his assistant, Sergei Zubov. In Magnitogorsk, Mike Keenan’s move upstairs to a consultancy role was a bigger surprise. Iron Mike’s Gagarin Cup success in 2014 was still fresh in the memory and the Canadian was a popular figure at Metallurg. But the team’s start to the season suggested all was not well: the potency of Mozyakin, Kovar and Zaripov could not wholly compensate for a creaking defense that gave up 54 goals in its first 22 games and the decision was made to promote Ilya Vorobyov to the hot seat.
Slava Voynov and Lubomir Visnovsky were the two big names to come to the KHL from across the Atlantic this month. Vishnovsky returned to his hometown team, Slovan Bratislava, after 14 seasons in the NHL, and went on to help Milos Riha’s team into the playoffs. Voynov, meanwhile, was forced to leave the LA Kings after serving a sentence for a misdemeanor charge relating to a domestic violence case. The double Stanley Cup winner was still technically a player with Traktor, his last Russian club, but after protracted negotiations the Chelyabinsk team agreed a deal for him to move to SKA. Voynov made his debut on Nov. 10, contributing an assist on Nikita Gusev’s game-tying goal as SKA beat Dynamo Moscow 3-2. While Voynov arrived in Petersburg to represent his first KHL team (his time in Chelyabinsk was before the KHL began), another player signed up for his eighth team in the competition at the end of the month. Nikolai Zherdev swapped HC Sochi for Torpedo. The forward, whose career has combined talent and frustration in equal measure, also played KHL hockey for Atlant, Ak Bars, Spartak, Severstal and Dynamo Moscow. He also signed up to play for Lev Prague in 2013 but left within weeks before the season got started. The first anniversary of the death of legendary trainer Viktor Tikhonov was commemorated with the unveiling of a monument to him at Moscow’s Vagankovsky Cemetery on Nov. 25. The memorial was designed by sculptor Alexander Kukushkin, based on the ideas of Tikhonov’s widow, Tatyana. The ceremony was attended by many of the hockey stars who played on Tikhonov’s teams, as well as IIHF President Rene Fasel and KHL chief Dmitry Chernyshenko.
Sergei Mozyakin reached another milestone on December 11 with two goals against SKA to become the second-highest Russian goalscorer of all time. He overtook Vyacheslav Starshinov’s 408 goals – but couldn’t save Metallurg Magnitogorsk from a 3-5 defeat. Russian hockey celebrated its 69th birthday – and Spartak Moscow went retro to commemorate the first ever game on December 22. Back in its traditional Sokolniki home, the Red-and-Whites held a historic-themed evening complete with vintage cars and fashions and even a Brezhnev lookalike watching on from the VIP box. But times change: back in the 1940s Moscow teams dominated the game; in 2015, Jokerit Helsinki eased to a 3-1 win over Spartak. Team Russia warmed up for the 2016 World Championship with its first games in the new VTB Arena. But Oleg Znarok’s team had mixed results in Moscow in the annual Channel 1 Cup competition. A record-breaking 8-1 thrashing of Finland was the highlight, but it was flanked by defeats against Sweden and the Czech Republic. Comings and goings continued, with former Traktor head coach Andrei Nikolishin taking over at Amur. SKA St. Petersburg was active in the transfer market, recruiting Steve Moses to pep up its offense. Moses, a KHL record goalscorer with Jokerit in the previous campaign, endured an unhappy return to America and headed back across the Atlantic after an unsuccessful stint with the Milwaukee Admirals. He made a bright start to life with SKA, scoring in his first two games for the club.
The All-Star Game set a clutch of new records and delighted a packed house in Moscow’s VTB Arena. The crowd was treated to the highest-scoring All-Star game thus far as the West won out 28-23. There were also individual records: Matt Ellison of Dinamo Minsk scored 7 goals, the best individual return. His solitary assist gave him eight points on the night, another record. Kirill Kaprizov of Metallurg Novokuznetsk became the youngest All-Star scorer. Alexander Radulov also caught the eye. He managed just one goal, but contrived to give away two penalty shots in the same incident as he wrestled with Sergei Mozyakin. Then, late in the game, he took over the goaltending duties to deny Mozyakin from yet another penalty shot, celebrating his save with greater excitement than his earlier goal. Beaten in the game, the East at least blazed a trail of glory to win the skills show. Linus Omark lit the way – literally – attempting a penalty with a blazing stick.
Elsewhere the race for playoff qualification was hotting up – and some teams were feeling the pressure. Dynamo Moscow, down in seventh place in the West at New Year, replaced head coach Harijs Vitolins with Sergei Oreshkin and immediately saw an upturn in form with a 5-1 thrashing of SKA. Avtomobilist hedged its bets: Andrei Razin was that rare thing, a healthy scratch behind the bench, as the team sort to lift itself back into the top eight at home to Severstal … The gamble didn’t work, Avto lost 2-0 … and Razin was back in place for the rest of the season. January 18th saw Vladimir Krikunov step down as head coach of Neftekhimik Nizhnekamsk – the 13th head coach to lose his job this season. That was another new KHL record.
CSKA wrapped up the regular season championship with a 3-1 win at Metallurg Magnitogorsk on Feb. 3. The success saw the Army Men extend their winning streak to 12 games on the way to a convincing margin of victory at the top of the table. But the game in Magnitogorsk was also a precursor of the battle for the season’s biggest prize. Elsewhere, the race for the Top-8 continued. In the East it was a three-horse race between Avtomobilist, Neftekhimik and Barys, although a sudden slump from Ak Bars briefly raised the prospect of the Kazan team missing out for the first time in the KHL era. Avto booked its spot first, a 3-0 victory over Ugra sending the Yekaterinburg team into seventh place. And when Barys failed to win in regulation at Eastern Conference leader Avangard on the final day of the season, Neftekhimik knew it had done enough to claim eighth place despite losing at home to Salavat Yulaev. In the West things were more clear cut. Dinamo Minsk’s hopes of crashing the Top-8 came to an end in early February as Slovan Bratislava, under the charismatic leadership of Milos Riha, clinched the final post-season berth with two games to spare. An overtime win over Dinamo Riga put the Slovaks through to face CSKA in the playoffs.
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