The Curious Case of the KHL

It's been a little less than a year since I huddled with Pavel Lysenkov of Sovetsky Sport to talk about how the powers that be in Russian hockey were determined to revive the sport's fortune's in their home country. Their solution: start by revamping the sport at the professional level with the creation of the Kontinental Hockey League.

It wasn't long before plenty of North American observers, myself included, began to gauge just what this new push at the professional level in Russia might mean for the future of the NHL. And when Avangard Omsk lured Jaromir Jagr to Siberia with a massive tax-free contract -- though only once Jagr discovered his services were no longer wanted in North America -- it seemed clear that the KHL was aiming to become legitimate competitor to the National Hockey League.

Fast-forward one year, and the situation isn't looking quite so rosy. The first indication that the league was experiencing significant growing pains came with the tragic death of New York Rangers prospect Alexei Cherepanov. In October, Cherepanov collapsed on the bench in the midst of a KHL match right beside the aforementioned Jagr. Later revelations that Cherepanov was taking performance- enhancing drugs that could have contributed to his death haven't helped the league's image either.

Or consider the curious case of Jagr's head coach with Avangard, Wayne Fleming. He was personally recruited by Jagr and convinced to leave his job as an assistant under Mike Keenan with the Calgary Flames to head to Siberia to take the head coaching job with Avangard. Last Thursday, Fleming disappeared in between the second and third period of a 2-1 overtime victory over Vityaz Chekhov, as the team announced after the game that he had been dismissed.

But wait, this is the KHL, where apparently nothing is forever. According to reports from over the weekend, Fleming was reinstated as mysteriously as he was dismissed, and was back running an Avangard practice on Sunday morning. As for Jagr, he's now making noises that he wouldn't mind playing for Pittsburgh again -- though there's no word as to what Mario, Sid and Evgeni might think about that.

But the issue foremost on the minds of the league's observers has to be money. Over and over again North American hockey writers like to remind their readers that the NHL is a gate-driven league. By contrast, the KHL is a sponsor-driven league, and many of those sponsors are involved in extracting oil and natural gas -- foremost among those sponsors is the Russian energy giant Gazprom.

Thanks to a mix of the global credit crisis and a subsequent crash in energy prices, the folks backing the KHL aren't exactly as flush as they were a year ago. We've already started hearing rumors that the owners might be seeking a league-wide pay cut above the 25 percent haircut the NHLPA had to endure in order to end the lockout that canceled the 2004-05 season.

Granted, the KHL isn't the only sports league experiencing financial stress. After all, many NHL observers are now openly talking about the possibility of franchise contraction, relocation and even a player dispersal draft. Still, it's hard not to remember how it wasn't all that long ago that many of us thought that the KHL was about to conquer a significant portion of the hockey world. Unfortunately, that's a world, like so many others these days, of diminished expectations.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.