Wild West: Belarusians and Severstal unexpectedly became the leaders of the regular season

If you look closely at the KHL regular season standings in the first days of December, you may have ambivalent feelings. Anyone who has been following the hockey championship for a long time will not be surprised at all what is happening in the Eastern Conference: the usual leaders in the form of Magnitogorsk, Ak Bars, and Avangard. The rich but unstable "Motorist" is in the middle. The slightly stalled Traktor and Salavat Yulaev, who are already desperately fighting for a place in the top eight, cannot be called a surprise either, especially if you know that before the start of the season Ufa distributed their main leaders and were close to withdrawing from the championship due to their unstable financial situation.

But in the West, the situation looks wild. The familiar long-term leaders CSKA and SKA are barely in the playoff zone, while Severstal and Dinamo Minsk are at the top.

Flip the table

The only one who habitually occupies a place at the top of the West is Lokomotiv, which hardly needs explanation: the almost unchanged championship squad, although with difficulty, is gradually getting used to the pedantic demands of Canadian Bob Hartley.

Frankly speaking, the leadership of Dinamo Minsk and Severstal should not be surprising at all. Dmitry Kvartalnov, a well-known Russian specialist, has been working with Minsk residents for the fourth season. During this time, the Belarusian hockey system has trained a high-quality generation of players who are now reaching their peak level. First of all, we are talking about forwards Vitaly Pinchuk, Egor Borisov and Vadim Moroz. It's too early to talk about them in a historical context, but perhaps these are the strongest players of Belarusian hockey in the post-Soviet era.

Cherepovets do not have a superstar squad, but due to the established system of play for the third season of head coach Andrey Kozyrev, they began to achieve more stable results. It was this specialist who put Larionov's "attacking hockey" in Torpedo, which was so admired by many fans. There is an opinion that with such adventurous hockey, Cherepovets will not achieve success in the playoffs anyway, but you can only talk about this in the spring.

As for the army clubs, the crisis, which was associated with the start of the season and the adaptation of the players to the change of coaching staff (in CSKA and SKA) and the general course of the club's development (in SKA), dragged on decently. The St. Petersburg army, led by Igor Larionov, with a squad no weaker than Roman Rotenberg's last year, could not find their game for a very long time. There were complaints about Larionov's overly harsh approach to one of the most prominent KHL players, Nikolai Goldobin, and his boundless trust in his son— Igor Larionov Jr. It was only in early December that St. Petersburg residents began to show more or less stable results.

"Torpedo has a good structure of the game, possession of the puck, its control"

Hockey player Vladimir Tkachev — about the goals of the Nizhny Novgorod team for the season and the secrets of its success in the current KHL championship

CSKA is even lower in the table, besides, the Moscow Army team played two more matches than SKA.

"We don't have a team," CSKA head coach Igor Nikitin told Izvestia. — It was about the same in Yaroslavl in the first year. One-on-one. Everything went a little milder there, but the story is very similar. It's just that Yaroslavl had one situation, CSKA had another. So I need to find a way to activate the guys. A team is not just 20 people sitting in the same locker room. These are people who can quarrel with each other, forgive each other, and are ready to correct their partner's mistake selflessly and without the coach's edification. We don't have that yet. Therefore, the guys do not do what they understand themselves, but only what the coach tells them. And it's very difficult to do what you're told during a game or in a series of matches every other day if you don't understand it and, most importantly, don't accept it. My task is simple: to explain, convince and force. Nothing new.

Known for his strict schemes, the specialist is forced to instill hockey, which brought the Gagarin Cup to the army in 2019 and to Lokomotiv in 2025, from scratch. And it seems that not all players are paying attention to his demands. What's worth is the pickle in reserve of Daniel Sprong, one of the strongest legionnaire signings of the 2025 offseason and the team's top scorer. As Nikitin himself says, good statistics numbers don't mean anything to him without playing the right game and completing the task.

Georgiev and Samsonov

Perhaps the most striking event of November was the return of two Russian goalkeepers from the NHL: Ilya Samsonov and Alexander Georgiev. Samsonov, who played in the same team with Alexander Ovechkin, as well as for Toronto and Vegas, did not find a job overseas and was ready to return to his native Magnitogorsk Metallurg. However, head coach Andrey Razin defended his desire to leave Ilya Nabokov and Alexander Smolin in front of the management. As a result, Samsonov went to Sochi, where he helped them win three straight away, which is worth its weight in gold for the KHL's main outsider.

Georgiev, unlike Samsonov, managed to find a job after a disastrous season in San Jose at Buffalo, but the club terminated his contract with him after two games for the Rochester farm club - Alexander had to go through the waiver draft procedure. The Russian goalkeeper with Bulgarian roots has signed a contract with Spartak until the end of next season. So far, he has played only two games for the red-whites, and it is inconclusive, and it is too early to talk about his form and prospects.

Four retirements in the KHL

Vyacheslav Butsaev from Sibir, Alexey Kudashov from Dynamo Moscow, Benoit Gruise from Traktor and Alexander Galchenyuk from Amur — this is an impressive list of dismissals for November. And it is far from complete: since the beginning of the championship, eight head coaches have been replaced in the clubs.

Vyacheslav Butsaev's resignation can be called the most expected and logical. After the weak start of the Siberians, Vadim Epanchintsev was fired. Novosibirsk management found nothing better than to call Butsaev, a specialist with a very ambiguous reputation among the players after working at Neftekhimik and Barys. In a short period of time, from October 2 to November 14, Siberia won three victories with 12 defeats under Butsaev, after which he was replaced by Yaroslav Luzenkov.

The most unexpected and to some extent sensational was the resignation of Alexei Kudashov. The specialist worked with Dynamo for the fourth season. In the past, he achieved the highest success during his time as head coach: reaching the KHL semifinals. However, the club's management, represented by president Viktor Voronin, was for some reason dissatisfied with his work, but found no reason to part with the coach. The weak start of the blue and white team was the signal for dismissal, but then the team under the leadership of Kudashov leveled the situation. This resignation looked all the more strange. Kudashov was replaced by the legend of the "Russian Five" of Detroit, Vyacheslav Kozlov, who was his assistant, tried to become the head coach of Sochi, but due to a change in the leadership of the southern club, he did not work a day there and returned to Dynamo.

"We haven't been able to find our way to someone else's gate lately"

Dynamo Moscow hockey player Artyom Ilyenko — about the defeat from the outsider of the East, the sensational dismissal of the head coach and the mood for the next matches

Equally strange were the resignations of Benoit Gru from Traktor and Alexander Galchenyuk from Amur. In the first year of working with Chelyabinsk, the Canadian specialist led the team to the finals. Yes, Traktor stalled a bit at the start, but no disaster happened to their game. Nevertheless, the Gru took it and announced that he was tired. We'll probably find out what the real reason was later. Former Gru assistant Rafael Richet was appointed as the acting head coach.

Alexander Galchenyuk stopped managing Khabarovsk residents on November 1. The official cause is acute respiratory viral infections, a common cold. However, the coach did not return to his place for a whole month, after which Amur finally announced his resignation, greatly amused the hockey community. The Belarusian specialist was replaced by his compatriot Alexander Andrievsky, who has extensive experience working in the KHL with the average and outsiders.