2024-03-30 10:00:00
Spring for the KHL is a time of big changes. On Thursday, March 28, an absentee meeting of the KHL Board of Directors ended, which made decisions on changing the timing of the championship and regulating the salary cap.
The KHL has officially announced that it is changing the dates of the championship. In the 2024/25 season, the KHL and MHL championships will be held until May 31 – extension for a whole month. The season is tentatively scheduled to start on September 5–7. There has been a lot of talk about not ending the regular season in February in the last two years, when the IIHF suspended the Russian team from participating in international competitions. If previously it was impossible to play until the summer because the Russian Hockey Federation demanded time to prepare for the World Championship, and the IIHF demanded that leagues end their seasons a week before the start of the tournament, now we can turn a blind eye to this. Who cares what President Luc Tardif and his team think when they prevent the Russians from competing at the national level?
A year ago, the KHL said that extending the season was a complex bureaucratic process, due to the fact that player contracts were valid until April 30. However, when they began to discuss the issue in detail, it turned out that nothing was impossible. It is important that many hockey players are in favor of a new season. More than once in the press you could see comments from players who said that ending the season in February (those who did not make it to the playoffs) sucks.
The coaches and the entire club staff must exhale, because 68 matches in the regular season in six months was a difficult challenge for them. Constant flights (in Russia they fly many times more than in the NHL), change of time zones, minimum time for training. So it turned out that especially tough specialists, like Leonid Tambiev, organized ice classes on January 1st. Now the schedule will not be so frantic, and this will reduce the risk of injuries, and it will also be a plus for the fans. When a club has a series of four or five home matches every other day, filling the stadium every time can be a problem. Now the playoffs will fall on the May holidays. People, instead of sitting at home, will be able to go to hockey on weekends.
The extension of the season is not the only change from the KHL. The league has limited the number of contracts for clubs – no more than 25 one-way at any time. And no more than 45 bilateral and trilateral (no more than 75 bilateral and trilateral for KHL clubs that have a common organizational and (or) financial structure with the VHL club team). This issue has also been discussed in the last few years, especially in the context of SKA. The St. Louis striker even spoke about this Pavel Buchnevich.
“I think the main problem is not the limit, but the limitation of the application so that clubs do not recruit 50 people, like SKA. They talk about some kind of system, but the strongest juniors under 21 are in the MHL and VHL. If I had gone from Severstal to SKA at the age of 18–19, I would have ended up playing hockey. It is impossible for a junior to make it into such a strong team. Even Matvey Michkov, a top junior, failed to do this, and there are so many other guys his age,” the hockey player said in his last interview with Sports.
This season, 41 field players and 5 goalkeepers played for the St. Petersburg army team. For comparison: Torpedo has 35 field players and 2 goalkeepers. It’s not such a big difference, but it is there – in that SKA has more experienced and famous players. And if the Torpedo players who were not included in the squad were sent to the youth league or the VHL, then in St. Petersburg every match the box for the players was filled. But the current KHL rule may not work. This season SKA had exactly 25 players on one-way contracts. The rest of the hockey players are on bilateral and trilateral contracts. And they may not even play in the MHL and VHL.
But still, life for SKA will become more difficult. The KHL can now refuse to register unilateral contracts in the period from June 1 (for 2024 – from May 1) until the end date of the club team’s application procedure to participate in the KHL championship, if the income from them exceeds the salary ceiling for the club’s hockey players. Last summer, the army team exceeded the salary cap by 300 million, but by the start of the season the payroll was “cleared”, sending several players to Lada and Sochi, and with some they re-signed contracts on new terms. But here too there is a new rule.
The KHL has established a registration limit: no more than three contracts of a “new” club with hockey players who, during the period from May 1 of last year to April 30 of this year, had a valid contract with the same “old” club. This means that no more than three players can be re-signed on “worse” terms to fit into the cap.
New criteria were also introduced for team bonuses for 1st–4th places at the end of the season, subject to which they are not included in the ceiling: the recipients of team bonuses are at least 60% of the first team players who took part in the playoff matches.
These rules will not radically change the KHL. And you can even bypass them. However, the message from the league to clubs is clear: the more loopholes you come up with, the more rules we will introduce. And this is not a campaign against SKA, as they might think in St. Petersburg, but a desire to equalize the rights of all clubs – both poor and rich. It’s fun to play by the rules. Look at the current playoffs: the intrigue and unpredictability cannot leave anyone indifferent. And there is still room to grow and develop. I’m glad that the league understands this very well.
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