The 2024 playoffs look to be one of the most interesting in history. Not only the Continental Hockey League, but also all club championships. The favorites, who have been reaching the final for years, are eliminated in the first rounds. The results of the matches are unpredictable, there is nothing to say about the attendance: even in Moscow it is 100 percent.
But after watching it, you constantly find yourself thinking: is the game we just saw really that good? Where does the bitter aftertaste come from with such an abundance of sensations? In the second round, the answer is obvious: the winning teams of the series play indoor hockey. Let’s take the confrontation between SKA and Avtomobilist out of the equation. The Ural team has no other option: in the wheelhouse, in the opposite direction and at maximum speed, the St. Petersburg team would simply crush the rival. Yekaterinburg can only pray for Alikin, for the density and effectiveness of its own traps, and also for the fact that the defenders do not follow the example of Koromyslov and Fedotov and, in conditions of increased pressure, do not begin to organize a “damn “. ” response in your area. Even Nikolai Zavarukhin admits that throwing back and blocking dozens of shots in one period is a conscious tactic of his team and sometimes the automobilist just has to think about when the opponent will stop running so fast.
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Take for example three other teams whose attack was pleasing to the eye throughout the championship. For those who have forgotten the numbers: in the 2023/2024 regular season, Spartak was first in terms of goals scored, Dynamo was third and Avangard was fifth. And now all three teams, with all their scattering of star forwards and myriad attacking skills, unanimously stopped shining. Instead of showing off, they suffer. And synchronously. Because we meet those who love, know and, most importantly, continue in principle, playing defensive hockey, laying “buses”, “traps” and other elements of the “dance from the stove”.
Spartak’s first goals were scored only in the third match of the series, and this is no coincidence. Magnitka’s head coach moved away from his usual aggressive and fast style, which characterized him while working at Severstal. Razin’s Metallurg now has two models: offensive and defensive. This is what the Urals use against the red and white. They don’t come to full-blown “cheating” just because the steelworkers don’t have a large number of experienced men with cup experience. And young people tend to make mistakes, which is why Spartak’s attack finally began on Thursday. But the trend is obvious and Muscovites will continue to have problems.
Andrey Razin, Yuri Trubachev, Sergei Mozyakin
Photo: Yuri Kuzmin, foto.khl.ru
Or look at how quickly Dynamo left, how all claims that the team had reached a new level faded away. Although the blue and white team put in a lot of effort. Even his coach Kudashov, who always plays the simplest indoor hockey, tried to rebuild his tactical patterns throughout the season. Having received artists in the person of Gusev, Ozhiganov and strengthened youth, the Muscovites began to consistently defeat inferior opponents, tried to act from a position of strength and decide the fate of the matches in the opponent’s goal. But in the playoffs, this redesigned car seriously stagnated already from the first round (it was fortunate that Minsk was missing 3-4 skillful leaders). And in the event of a collision with a tractor, it simply crashed and fell apart into separate “spare parts”.
The reason is the same: the concrete-filled defense lines, which Chelyabinsk inherited from Gatiyatulin. Zavarukhin left all the best that the team could do under his predecessor: a tendency to dry up the game, nullify any creativity. And don’t be fooled by the results of the series, which pleases those who like to bet on the “best” result. The “Tractor Drivers” convert between 70 and 90% of their opportunities, which we have to thank Dynamo’s insecure goalkeeping team. And the blue and white field players are too nervous, too afraid of the counterattacks of Shabanov, Burdasov and company. Kudashov’s team is simply banging its head against a brick wall, and the effectiveness of the main stars is best illustrated by the example of Gusev. His scoring statistics are comparable to those of the mediocre third line worker Ilyenko.
“Dynamo” (Moscow) – “Traktor” (Chelyabinsk)
Photo: Vladimir Bezzubov, photo.khl.ru
But the maximum anti-spectacle is in the Lokomotiv series with Avangard. Even the 7-0 in the second game seems good only on paper. If you watched the match, you saw that the Yaroslavl team missed even the most clumsy shots (it is no coincidence that advanced statistics show that the winners scored 3-3.5 goals). Nikitin is very happy when his players play 0-0 and wait for the opponent’s mistakes. Just as in the first match, when they were delighted by Kiselevich’s fall in the 90th minute, the Omsk crowd also felt that this was an incredibly difficult match. The bad thing about the series is that it doesn’t contain anything that makes us love hockey.
The movement is there, the runs and the ability to throw the puck out of your own zone are at the level, but there is no creativity, no passion, no combinations, no scoring chances that transcend the emotion. Lokomotiv managed to practically nullify Avangard’s offensive potential. The first line of the Omsk team with the most expensive players in the league, Tkachev and Boucher, has one goal in three meetings, the second line with Zhafyarov and Prokhorkin also has one goal. The epithet “a pale shadow of the regular season itself” also suits Tkachev better than Gusev. The paradox is that the Yaroslavl team, having encountered exactly the same “traps” in the third game, got caught in them in the same way.
Is this the kind of hockey we need? No!
Well, who is interested in watching this type of hockey? Because of the trend of defensive tactics, the fans lose, the league loses, and the sport as a whole loses. The destroyers are stronger than the creators and in this sense nothing has changed compared to the Super League of 25 years ago. In addition, almost all teams dried up the game, the results were 1:0 and 2:1, there were not enough players and those who suddenly opened up quickly degraded, due to the fact that they were brought to a “common denominator” by part of their own coaches. The principle “even if ugly, but uniform” is good in the army. And it damaged our hockey in everything. For example, the team was constantly eliminated from the World Cup long before the stage of fighting for medals. Because hockey players were not used to moving forward and saving failed games. In addition, biased refereeing corrupted athletes, who unconsciously became accustomed to the fact that nothing would happen to them for fouls, and then, in a national team jersey, received penalty after penalty from referees without charges.
Igor Nikitin
Photo: Dmitry Loshkarev, photo.khl.ru
But now I don’t even want to raise the issue of international competitiveness. Not only because of its temporal irrelevance. But because defensive hockey threatens big problems for the national championship. No show, no interest from the fans. There is no mass interest: the league fails to fulfill one of its strategic tasks. We see what is happening in a related sport, bandy. In Arkhangelsk and Krasnoyarsk the stands may be full, but throughout the country not even the names of the main stars of the championship are known. “Puck” has the same risks: regression, local interest in club hockey, inability to expand beyond the cities whose teams are represented in the championship. But a sharp drop in the importance of image entails the fact that economic well-being will also end: will sponsors allocate billions of rubles to a second-rate sport?
And after all, Magnitogorsk, Traktor and Lokomotiv have quite bright players, real stars capable of demonstrating high-quality and spectacular play. And if, even with such a selection of players, clubs continue to operate in a dismal manner, it is time for the league to intervene. It’s time for the KHL to find something to fight the destroyers of hockey’s future. The salary cap is clearly not enough for this: earlier it was believed that “traps” and “buses” were a necessary measure for the middle peasants to oppose the superstar giants, but now, when financial opportunities are approximately equal, The fashion for destructiveness has increased. It hasn’t disappeared. And if it’s not eliminated, then the rise in club hockey popularity we see now may still be a rise.
