Ak Bars did not start the season very strongly, although expectations after the big summer acquisitions were high. The Kazan team had already unexpectedly lost to Sochi and then also lost in the Green Derby. And now, immediately after this problem, Torpedo came to visit them, who started like a champion: five wins in five games. Nizhny Novgorod remains the only KHL team that remains undefeated.
The Green Derby became a thriller. Ufa crushed Radulov and company.
Vadim Shipachev attracted special attention. The fact is that in the last game he equaled Sergei Mozyakin in the number of points scored in the regular season. And now he has a chance to become the league’s sole record holder. However, the start of the match turned out in Torpedo’s favor. The team created a couple of dangerous moments, then Ak Bars was able to more or less level the game. But it would still be correct to say that the first 20 minutes of the match were downright boring.
After a rather boring first half, the second turned out to be a whirlwind. Within a minute, Torpedo pulled off a great combination in which the puck flew from one player to another at such speed that the Ak Bars defenders simply stood and watched as Maxim Letunov scored with a dime touch. The Kazan team then had an excellent opportunity to come back with almost consecutive power plays, but instead conceded again: a shot from the blue line after a won throw-in ended with Andrei Belevich scoring the ball.
RIA Novosti
You have to give the Leopards their due: they didn’t give up, but kept trying to save the game. And only a couple of minutes later they managed to reduce the difference on the scoreboard: Nikita Dynyak successfully fought for the puck behind the goal, throwing it into the nickel, where Dmitry Katelevsky turned out to be the most effective. And five minutes before the break, luck once again smiled on the ice hosts: the puck, after a series of rebounds, was thrown a couple of meters in front of the visiting goal, and Dmitry Yashkin was the first to react. By the way, Shipachev became an assistant. That’s how unpleasant and random the center forward’s record point was. Afterwards, the Nizhny Novgorod team was about to score again in the minority, but Timur Bilyalov neutralized the one-on-one.
HC “Ak Bars”
In the third period, Ak Bars took the lead for the first time in the game after a power-play goal from Kirill Semyonov. The rest of the match was very tense: Torpedo managed to equalize the score thanks to a goal from Artyom Silaev, but this was only enough for literally a minute and a half until the moment when Stanislav Galiev scored the final score of the match. match – 4:3.
Larionov’s chicks inflicted the first defeat on the SKA. Rotenberg was beside himself
Ak Bars tried to neutralize Torpedo’s combination game with physical pressure. Already in the first half the advantage of the Kazan team in strength techniques was overwhelming: 9:1. Considering the result, we can say that it worked, but still, the game was much more divided into segments separated by constant eliminations, of which there were many. We also observed that Ak Bars, playing in the majority, allowed the opponent to create a surprising number of scoring opportunities. And while in this particular case this didn’t stop us from winning, it could cause the team a lot more problems in the future.
