Spartak vs SKA. Who will win the central fight of the day?
The capital's Megasport Arena on January 12 will be the venue for the main match of the next game day in the KHL. The recent leader of the Western Conference, Spartak Moscow, will host SKA St. Petersburg, which has gained momentum, on home ice.
The red-whites went through the first part of the championship perfectly, at some point even taking the lead in the West. The first alarm bell was the serious injury of first-line center forward Ivan Morozov, which he received back in mid-November. Without Morozov, the red-white strike trio, which, in addition to Ivan, included Pavel Poryadin and Nikolai Goldobin, disintegrated. Spartak still continues to be the most productive team in the League, but now Alexei Zhamnov’s charges are scoring noticeably less. If the average performance for the season for Spartak fluctuates around four goals per match, then in the January games this figure dropped to 1.5 goals per game.
Morozov's place in the first line was taken by the urgently signed Mikhail Maltsev, who began the season in the AHL. While the replacement does not look equivalent, in January Spartak lost all three matches played, scoring only four goals. After the fiasco in Minsk, where Spartak lost to the local Dynamo with a score of 1-3, the capital team fell back to third place in the standings, with 67 points scored, losing one point to two teams at once - fellow countrymen from Dynamo and Yaroslavl Lokomotiv.
SKA
The St. Petersburg club also didn’t have the best start to January, managing to lose twice on home ice. The result is quite unexpected, since according to the results of November - December, it was SKA that became the best team in the League, with a noticeable gap from its closest competitors. A certain justification for the St. Petersburg hockey players is the level of the opponents; they had to play against the leader of the Eastern Conference, Magnitogorsk Metallurg, and Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, which was in the top three in the West.
Both games followed a similar scenario, ending with the same score 1-2 in favor of the visiting team. Both times the St. Petersburg team opened the scoring, in the game against the railway workers Bardakov did it, in the match against Metallurg Zinchenko, but in the future the St. Petersburg team was unable to build on their success. SKA lost to Lokomotiv in regular time, and to Metallurg in overtime, missing the decisive goal after an obvious refereeing error. Despite two defeats in a row, the St. Petersburg team can easily count on first place in the Western Conference. Now the army team is in fourth place, but only four points separate Roman Rotenberg’s team from the leading duo of Dynamo and Lokomotiv.
Our Expert Predictions & Analysis on Spartak vs SKA
SpartakThe red-whites went through the first part of the championship perfectly, at some point even taking the lead in the West. The first alarm bell was the serious injury of first-line center forward Ivan Morozov, which he received back in mid-November. Without Morozov, the red-white strike trio, which, in addition to Ivan, included Pavel Poryadin and Nikolai Goldobin, disintegrated. Spartak still continues to be the most productive team in the League, but now Alexei Zhamnov’s charges are scoring noticeably less. If the average performance for the season for Spartak fluctuates around four goals per match, then in the January games this figure dropped to 1.5 goals per game.
Morozov's place in the first line was taken by the urgently signed Mikhail Maltsev, who began the season in the AHL. While the replacement does not look equivalent, in January Spartak lost all three matches played, scoring only four goals. After the fiasco in Minsk, where Spartak lost to the local Dynamo with a score of 1-3, the capital team fell back to third place in the standings, with 67 points scored, losing one point to two teams at once - fellow countrymen from Dynamo and Yaroslavl Lokomotiv.
SKA
The St. Petersburg club also didn’t have the best start to January, managing to lose twice on home ice. The result is quite unexpected, since according to the results of November - December, it was SKA that became the best team in the League, with a noticeable gap from its closest competitors. A certain justification for the St. Petersburg hockey players is the level of the opponents; they had to play against the leader of the Eastern Conference, Magnitogorsk Metallurg, and Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, which was in the top three in the West.
Both games followed a similar scenario, ending with the same score 1-2 in favor of the visiting team. Both times the St. Petersburg team opened the scoring, in the game against the railway workers Bardakov did it, in the match against Metallurg Zinchenko, but in the future the St. Petersburg team was unable to build on their success. SKA lost to Lokomotiv in regular time, and to Metallurg in overtime, missing the decisive goal after an obvious refereeing error. Despite two defeats in a row, the St. Petersburg team can easily count on first place in the Western Conference. Now the army team is in fourth place, but only four points separate Roman Rotenberg’s team from the leading duo of Dynamo and Lokomotiv.
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