The KHL playoffs are in a surprising second round. Regular season champions Dynamo and the country’s most ambitious club, SKA, can’t do anything with the Zavarukhin brothers’ teams and face relegation after just three games in the series; Avangard fires the coach right during the battle with Lokomotiv; Spartak, with the best attack of the season, cannot score in two games in a row against the young KHL debutant goalkeeper. These are all completely new and unprecedented stories for our league, which has become accustomed to boring stability in cup matches, so these playoffs can already be considered, if not the best, then the most unpredictable in history. And there will be more!
“Dynamo” – academics with canes. And this way they have no chance against the Chelyabinsk hooligans.
Dinamo Moscow, which won the Continental Cup at the end of the regular season, is struggling in these playoffs. The Minsk “bisons” also imposed an absolutely even fight on the blue and white in the first round and lost mainly due to their own mistakes and a large number of eliminations. Well, “Traktor” has more teachers on its roster and the team spirit is incredible. And it is he – the spirit – who makes the difference in this series. Alexey Kudashov can be as surprised as he wants that the series is tied and the score is 0-3, but according to the behavior of ice hockey players, everything is, in general, natural. The academic “Dynamo” is still trying to play correctly, to somehow adjust its tactics, not realizing that it is impossible to deal with street hooligans, like the Traktor players who suddenly appeared in these playoffs, without converting at least half in the same evil and insolent gang.
“Dynamo” – “Tractor”
Photo: Pavel Tabarchuk, foto.khl.ru
Dinamo does not show character, anger, any kind of aggression and at the same time, in tactical terms, not everything is perfect for them, and even failures in the goalkeeping position. “Traktor”, on the other hand, simply crushes the Moscow club with charisma and desire, neutralizes the leaders of “Dynamo”, some of them, however, play with injuries, hit where it hurts (goalkeepers) and gnaw a victory after another. other. How can the blue and white win here? They can only hope that in the next match Traktor gets a little burned by the proximity of the semi-finals and gets nervous, but will a Dynamo victory change anything? The question is open, but the Chelyabinsk team has already passed the test of defeats in these playoffs.
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Avangard patiently decided to save the series with Lokomotiv. Is this what Kravets disagreed with?
Avangard fired the coach during the playoffs and the next day he took and won the third game of the series against Lokomotiv. Those who say that the Hawks bounced back in this game will be somewhat right, but not entirely. Yes, Yaroslavl pressed non-stop in the second and third periods. Yes, “Avangard” crossed the other team’s blue line several times in these 40 minutes while controlling the puck, and Daniil Isaev was practically frozen in the goal with no work to do. Yes, Lokomotiv outnumbered their opponents in skating volume, probably ten times, without allowing the Omsk team to make even a short pass outside their zone, which created the feeling of colossal dominance of the Yaroslavl team.
“Avant-garde” – “Lokomotiv”
Photo: Yaroslav Neelov, photo.khl.ru
But on the other hand, how many truly dangerous moments did Lokomotiv create? Has Avangard completely lost its place? Most of Yaroslavl’s pressure came down to endless puck control around the perimeter and shots the Hawks’ goalie saw. Omsk stopped trying to run over Lokomotiv, simplified the game as much as possible in their own zone and in the middle zone, played with discipline and patience and turned the puck over. This, of course, is not at all the kind of hockey that Avangard has been preaching all season, but is it possible to beat Lokomotiv in any other way if you are not ready to run around the court with the same intensity as Yaroslavl? But it is evident that the “hawks” are not prepared.
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And, quite possibly, it was precisely the reluctance to change something that led to the dismissal of Mikhail Kravets. The coach believed in his system, but the management (and, probably, the hockey players) did not believe that with him it would be possible to beat a machine like Lokomotiv. Therefore, Kravets’ resignation is not an impulsive decision after 0-7. There it was not about the score, but about Avangard’s total helplessness in the match. The club weighed everything and decided to save this series, although using unpopular measures. So far this measure has already worked, but what will happen next? I am sure that Lokomotiv will trample with redoubled force in the coming matches and will do everything the same, and here the question is: Will Avangard (and Pavel Khomchenko in particular) be able to resist and endure again and again? And of course, the “hawks” really lack well-thought-out counterattacks, which are like a breath of fresh air for a team that has opted for defensive tactics. But “Lokomotiv”, thanks to its incredible movement, manages to do everything on time and does not make mistakes, and it is almost impossible to force the railwaymen to make them, constantly digging in their zone.
SKA read “Avtomobilist” in full, but Peter does not want to change
SKA is still completely defenseless against Avtomobilist. In addition, the army team loses the series not because of errors in defense (although this, of course, also affects), but because of the terrible dullness in attack of the St. Petersburg club. The simplicity of SKA still ruins the team in the competition with a clear, tough and systematic defense, while the army team could do with showing something like a jackhammer, like Lokomotiv. But for this type of tactics, the SKA attack severely lacks rhythm and movement. In the series “Avtomobilist” the army team has zero creativity (with this or that composition), most of them do not work and the Urals do not even have to make additional efforts to neutralize the St. Petersburg attack. . Well, as a rule, Zavarukhin’s team does not have to wait long for SKA’s mistakes and punishes them with deadly composure.
It is surprising that the SKA coaching staff cannot reveal even half of the potential of the attack of a team rich in names. In the last three games, the army team has not changed its tactics, continuing to bang its head against the wall and literally scoring every goal. Simple statistics give a completely false impression of the upcoming game for SKA: in yesterday’s match in Yekaterinburg, the guests significantly outperformed the hosts, but the overwhelming majority of these shots were made from such positions that Evgeniy Alikin did not even he had to worry. Nobody allowed the SKA forwards to get into the slot, on the spot (with the rarest exception) the army team simply did not have any attack on the move, let alone with a numerical advantage, and the guests organized the only goal when Avtomobilist, perhaps for the only time in the match, got slightly carried away by a promising attack.
Watching the game there was no feeling of superiority in shooting on SKA’s part. On the contrary, it seemed that Avtomobilist acted more dangerously, launching regular counterattacks, and that the draw in regulation time was more a credit to Nikita Serebryakov than to Alikin. SKA does not want to change. He does not simplify his hockey, does not eliminate the extra pass in someone else’s zone, does not increase the size of the attack: Kadeikin is in the reserve, names like Shvets-Rogovoy and Grebenshchikov are forgotten. Perhaps these are the kind of workers the army team needs now, since relying on technical players obviously doesn’t work. “Avtomobilist” breaks his efforts like crazy, reads his plans like an open book. Therefore, it is possible to change the SKA series only with the help of non-standard solutions, which do not include the banal mixing of all three players.
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“Spartak” and “Magnitka” starred in the goal shootout. This is the type of hockey we’ve come to expect from this series.
The Moscow match between Spartak and Metallurg was not much different from the Magnitogorsk matches. It was expected that away from home it would be more difficult for the Urals to perform with a minimum of errors in defense, as at home, that the bravery of the young Ilya Nabokov would not last forever and that Spartak, with the support of its magnificent fans, would be season, they would simply move forward.
And so it happened. “Metallurg” does not have a defensive system that works as well as “Lokomotiv” or “Avtomobilist” to forever silence the brilliant attack of “Spartak”, and thanks to the actions of the attack, the red and white won the first victory in the series. At the same time, Magnitogorsk also had a lot of chances, shots and free ice to win, but Spartak scored more timely goals yesterday.
In general, the third match of the series went as the previous ones should have gone: one of the teams won in the shootout. We should probably expect the same type of hockey in the future; Opponents are unlikely to shut down because they don’t know how to do it very well. And now it is almost impossible to predict the winner of this series, except that the continued home field advantage speaks for Magnitka.
