SKA's confidence, Avtomobilist's breakthrough and Neftekhimik's ten defeats: what do you remember about the first month of the KHL regular season

Confidence of SKA and Metallurg

While a number of leaders of the Continental Hockey League started the new championship without a hitch, only two teams confirmed the status of favorites.

In the West, the usual high class continued to demonstrate SKA, and in the East, the finalist of the last Gagarin Cup, Metallurg, got off to a great start.

But if Magnitogorsk suffered three defeats in the starting 11 matches of the championship, including failure in regular time, then the Petersburgers were inferior only in the shootout.

Dynamo Moscow managed to spoil the statistics for Roman Rotenberg's wards, which impresses with its competitiveness after the loss of a number of star performers.

Moreover, the first misfire SKA occurred only in the tenth meeting of the season.

Prior to this, the army team has always prevailed, and only twice they failed to deal with rivals in 60 minutes.

Salavat Yulaev and Severstal fought on equal terms with them, but the former were not lucky enough to miss Damir Zhafyarov's smashing shot in overtime, while the latter lost in the shootout.

A distinctive feature of SKA is balance.

Rotenberg's wards are second in the number of goals scored (36) and are in the top three in missed goals (16).

And this merit belongs not only to the defense, but also to the young goalkeeper Dmitry Nikolaev.

The 22-year-old goalkeeper is on the third line in terms of the percentage of reflected shots (95%) among those who have played more than half of the matches, and in terms of the reliability coefficient, he is completely ahead of all competitors (1.28).

In many ways, it was his inspired game that helped the St. Petersburg team not to concede a penalty for almost 61 minutes, and allowed him to repeat the club record.

To reach the mark of ten victories, it took him only 13 games at the start - like his predecessors Sergei Bobrovsky and Evgeny Ivannikov.

As for Metallurg, its confident performance in the first month is largely due to an easy calendar.

Among the teams defeated by him, only Torpedo, Dynamo Minsk and Spartak are now in the top ten of the league table, and most of the points were obtained with opponents of the level of Kunlun and Admiral.

The impression of failure in confrontations with CSKA, Severstal and Amur is a little blurred, although the latter managed to take revenge twice.

True, all three of Metallurg's defeats fell on the starting season of the championship, after which the team won seven victories in a row and has every chance to extend the successful streak.

In the near future they will meet with the outsider of the tournament "Neftekhimik" and the distressed "Tractor", in which they will clearly be favorites.

And this despite the possible absence of injured Josh Curry and the situation around Nikolai Goldobin.

One of the best scorers of Magnitogorsk in the last playoffs missed four matches in a row for unknown reasons, but even this did not affect the performance of the team.

In total, 23 field hockey players have already managed to record points in their assets, and Russian Denis Zernov and star legionnaires Brendan Lipsik and Philippe Maye look especially impressive.

Adaptation of "Ak Bars"

If you look solely at the position in the table, then Ak Bars as a whole lives up to expectations.

That's just from replenished with a number of stars and named "dream team" team expected much more.

First of all, it concerns the level of the game and the performance of its newly minted leaders.

If the same Alexander Radulov and Kirill Semyonov more or less confirm their status and gain an average of about a point per match, then their partners do not yet look so impressive.

Vadim Shipachev scored only four effective actions (2 + 2) in ten meetings, and Vyacheslav Voinov has half as many (1 + 1) in the asset.

The real disaster was the implementation of the majority, where hopes were pinned precisely on experienced performers.

Kazan used their chance only in 9.8% of cases, and for the first time converted an extra player only on September 25 - in the confrontation with Traktor.

As for Radulov, not only his productivity is one of the topics for discussion.

The forward repeatedly showed intemperance and not only earned 12 minutes of penalty time, but managed to fight with Spartak defender Nikita Sokolov and receive a fine for a rough foul on Maxim Fedotov from Torpedo.

As a result, his next achievement remained a little in the shadow.

In the match with Traktor, he scored the 392nd assist in the KHL and came third in the list of the best league assistants in history.

According to this indicator, he is second only to Metallurg legend Sergei Mozyakin (509) and his teammate Shipachev (557).

Difficulties of CSKA and Avangard

But if Ak Bars continues to regularly get the better of their rivals, albeit in a not very striking manner, then the other two top teams cannot boast of stability yet.

CSKA and Avangard scored 13 and nine points, respectively, and hardly enter the playoff zone.

But if the failure of the Omsk team can be explained by the most difficult schedule, according to which they were forced to play away 11 times in a row, then the failures of the army team have a number of reasons.

Not only are they less productive offensively, but they have become weaker defensively, which translates into a large number of goals conceded (28) and penalty minutes (135).

The Red-Blues are among the top three toughest teams in the league, behind only Dynamo Minsk (179) and Kunlun (201).

Under these conditions, the stars do not show themselves in the most impressive way.

By and large, only Mikhail Grigorenko (4 + 4) and Nikita Nesterov (1 + 7) justify the status of the current holders of the Gagarin Cup, while their partners still look much more modest.

Below their capabilities are the leaders of the army team in the last Gagarin Cup - Konstantin Okulov and Vladislav Kamenev, who scored only four points for two.

And the absence of Ivan Fedotov affects the goalkeeper's line.

His replacements in the person of Adam Reideborn and Alexander Sharychenkov still miss too much and are not even in the top 20 in terms of the percentage of reflected shots.

Against this background, the problems of the "Avant-garde" seem less serious.

Even though he is currently in eighth place in the Eastern Conference table, he is already beginning to find his rhythm and get used to the requirements of the new head coach.

At the start of the season, Dmitry Ryabykin's team went through a series of six defeats, then won four out of six matches, and will soon play for the first time at the new arena in Omsk.

In addition to CSKA and Avangard, Traktor was also unpleasantly surprised, having already suffered seven defeats, and all of them in regular time.

But given the personnel losses, it was quite expected.

In the summer, Chelyabinsk lost a number of strong foreign hockey players, including Lukas Sedlak, Tomas Giki and Roman Villa, and even Vitaly Kravtsov went to conquer the NHL.

They haven't been able to find a suitable replacement yet.

And if the reinforcement does not appear in the very near future, then it will be extremely difficult to count on getting into the playoffs, not to mention reaching the conference finals for the second time in a row.

The fiasco of Neftekhimik and Sochi, the breakthrough of Avtomobilist

Surely, few people expected that Nizhnekamsk and Sochi residents would be among the leaders of the KHL and compete on equal terms with the conditional Metallurg and SKA for the top places in the table, but it was quite difficult to predict such a deafening failure.

This is especially true of Neftekhimik, which at the start had a series of ten defeats in a row.

And although on the eve of the "wolves" managed to cope with "Siberia", this is unlikely to seriously cheer up their fans.

After 11 meetings held, the club has three points in its assets and shares the last line in the standings with Sochi.

A pleasant surprise was the bright performance of Avtomobilist.

In the last regular season, Yekaterinburgers took only ninth place in the East and for the first time since 2017 they failed to qualify for the KHL playoffs, but they made the appropriate conclusions and replenished the roster with several skillful hockey players in the summer.

The result was not long in coming.

In 11 matches, the wards of Nikolai Zavarukhin won eight victories (all in regular time), and their attacking quartet settled at the top of the scorer race.

Brooks Maysek, Stefan Da Costa and ex-Spartak forward Sergey Shirokov scored 16 points each.

Another 14 were added to the piggy bank by Curtis Valk, who moved from Barys.

As a result, third place in the KHL and the status of Metallurg's main pursuer in the Eastern Conference.

True, it is still too early to draw far-reaching conclusions about the prospects for Avtomobilist.

In many ways, their success is due to not the most difficult calendar and it is not a fact that the team will be able to maintain such a pace: in the near future they will have three meetings with Ak Bars and a confrontation with Salavat Yulaev.