Spartak Moscow could not cope with the best team In the Eastern Conference of the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) season, St. Petersburg SKA was eliminated earlier than the semi-finals for the first time in ten years, and Traktor and Avtomobilist, led by the Zavarukhin cousins, are creating a sensation. The results of the second round of the playoffs are in the review Sports.
SKA took up arms against the judges after failure in the playoffs. St. Petersburg SKA sensationally ended the KHL season already at the stage of the second round. The army team has not stopped fighting for the Gagarin Cup so early over the past ten years. In the 2013/14 season, St. Petersburg residents were not allowed into the semifinals of the tournament by Yaroslavl Lokomotiv. In the same tournament, SKA stumbled against the Ekaterinburg Avtomobilist, losing in five matches of the series.
After the decisive game, SKA representatives noted the influence of the referees' work on the team's result. And if the head coach of the army team, Roman Rotenberg, in his commentary tried not to touch upon the topic of refereeing, then the chairman of the board of directors of the St. Petersburg club, Alexander Medvedev, sharply criticized them.
«In terms of refereeing, yesterday we saw something that had been going on all season. The playoffs, including the fifth match of the series with Avtomobilist, only confirmed this. Throughout the season, the club has been faced with similar dubious decisions of referees. In the playoffs offs SKA has the most two-minute penalties by a significant margin. I think all referees need to look in the mirror and change their approach to work — with a couple of such decisions you can throw away months of work of dozens of people. Incomprehensibly canceled goals, strange deletions — all this has been going on for a long time , and no one takes responsibility. Therefore, Chatsky’s question from “Woe from Wit”: “Who are the judges?” is far from rhetorical, but requires an answer,” the SKA press service quotes Medvedev as saying.
The Zavarukhin brothers work wonders One of the main sensations of the entire second round of the KHL playoffs is the success of Traktor and Avtomobilist, led by cousins Alexey and Nikolai Zavarukhin, respectively. The Chelyabinsk team broke the resistance of Dynamo Moscow and did not lose a single match of the series to the best club of the regular season — 4-0.
«Avtomobilist» first dealt with the finalist of the last Gagarin Cup — Kazan «Ak Bars», and in the second round beat SKA, which was considered the favorite of the tournament. It is noteworthy that Nikolai Zavarukhin’s team was close to repeating the result of the Traktor and Dynamo series. However, the Ekaterinburg team allowed SKA to extend the confrontation, but only for one match (4-1). Avtomobilist will play in the semi-finals of the KHL playoffs for the first time in its history.
“Lokomotiv” is the only club in the West. Yaroslavl “Lokomotiv” remained the only representative of the Western Conference in the current Gagarin Cup. For the first time in the history of the tournament, the current playoffs are being held in a cross-bracket format — from the second round, teams from both conferences were mixed with each other. Only Igor Nikitin’s wards passed this test. Moreover, the railway workers brought themselves to a critical situation: they won the first two matches of the series, simultaneously sentencing Mikhail Kravets to resign from the post of head coach of Avangard, but they lost their advantage and allowed the Omsk team to move the confrontation into the seventh match. The Yaroslavl team still avoided the fiasco by beating the Hawks dry in the decisive match.
Spartak Moscow could have accompanied Lokomotiv in the semi-finals of the Gagarin Cup. Alexey Zhamnov's team finished the regular season as the most productive team in the league (233 goals in 68 matches) and confidently beat Severstal in the first round, also making this series the richest in goals. However, in the second round the “red-whites” faced a problem. With an essentially equal game and a large number of scoring chances, Spartak did not score a single goal in three of the six matches against Magnitogorsk Metallurg, giving 21-year-old Ilya Nabokov three shutouts.
Gagarin Cup semi-final pairs:
- Metallurg (Magnitogorsk) — Avtomobilist (Ekaterinburg);
- «Lokomotiv» (Yaroslavl) — «Traktor» (Chelyabinsk).