KHL playoff game ends with wicked line brawl

As many of you die-hard KHL fans likely already know, the league’s postseason has been bananas so far. While the West’s top two seeds (CSKA and SKA) have advanced to their conference’s final, the East has seen a number of exciting upsets.

As a result, Avangard Omsk — the East’s four seed — and Salavat Yulaev Ufa — the six seed — are currently in the middle of a best-of-seven series to determine who will play in the Gagarin Cup final.

Based on the actions of the two squads late in game four, I’ve come to the intuitive conclusion that they don’t like each other very much.

With Avangard up 4-2 in the third period and literally seconds away from a 3-1 stranglehold in the series, all hell broke loose following a late faceoff.

The puck dropped and the two centremen — Salavat Yulaev’s Daniil Skorikov and Avangard’s Semyon Koshelev — clearly had no interest in it. Instead of trying to obtain possession for their team, all that they wanted to do was throw hands and send a message ahead of their next meeting.

Once the two of them started going at it, the others on the ice paired off and followed their lead. After the dust settled, the official scorer became the busiest person in the building.

In total, the two sides combined for 80 minutes in penalties in the third period and 107 overall. To put that in perspective, the squads had 56 penalty minutes total through the first three games of the series.

With the heat turned way up, game five on Saturday has the potential to be quite, um, interesting.

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