Lokomotiv Yaroslavl opens the new Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) season on Saturday, September 5, chasing a third consecutive Gagarin Cup, a feat previously managed only by CSKA Moscow, Dynamo Moscow and Ak Bars Kazan.
Lokomotiv won its two previous titles under different coaches, Igor Nikitin and Bob Hartley. This season the club is led by Dmitry Kvartalnov, a well known specialist who previously coached Lokomotiv from 2017 to 2019 but has never won a Gagarin Cup as head coach, making the new season a personal test for him.
Lokomotiv president Yuri Yakovlev said the club wanted to win again and would do everything it could to make that happen, but insisted there was no boastful mood in the squad about simply walking out and beating everyone. He said the team was working calmly and understood the responsibility placed on it.
To keep its championship roster together within the salary cap, Lokomotiv terminated contracts with ten key players in the off-season before immediately re-signing them on more modest terms, making up the difference with championship bonuses. Forward Alexander Radulov, one of the most prominent KHL players of the past 10 to 15 years, remains with the squad.
Obstacles ahead
All 22 regular-season clubs hope to knock Lokomotiv off the top, but CSKA Moscow and Avangard Omsk stand out as the strongest rivals. CSKA won back-to-back titles under Sergei Fyodorov before three straight seasons of quarterfinal exits. Since May 2025 the club has been led by Igor Nikitin, the coach who built Lokomotiv's title-winning team. He fell short with CSKA last season, but the club strengthened significantly over the summer, adding defenseman Yegor Zamula from the NHL, Canadian defenseman Robert Hamilton from Dynamo Minsk, and SKA's leading scorer from last season, Marat Khayrullin. CSKA did not lose any of its own leading players.
Former Russia national team head coach Vladimir Krikunov said Nikitin knows how to work and should have things running smoothly at CSKA, adding that Nikitin appeared to have learned from last season and was becoming more experienced.
Avangard Omsk, five years removed from its last title, came agonisingly close last season, taking eventual champion Lokomotiv to one of the most dramatic series in KHL history in the semifinals. Leading 2-0 in Game 6, Avangard conceded two goals in 33 seconds late in regulation and lost in overtime; Lokomotiv pulled off the same trick, only earlier, to win the decisive Game 7. Many around the club have yet to get over that collapse. Most experts rate Avangard's roster as the strongest in the league after an active summer transfer market, but the club lost six players to injury late last season and in preseason, including captain and record-scoring defenseman Damir Sharipzyanov, leaving head coach Guy Boucher with a personnel puzzle to solve.
Exodus from Kazan
Ak Bars Kazan, beaten by Lokomotiv in last season's Gagarin Cup final, enters the new campaign in disarray after a mass departure of leading players.
Forwards Ilya Karpukhin, Alexander Barabanov, Ilya Safonov, Nathan Todd, Dmitri Yashkin, Konstantin Luchevnikov and Stepan Falkovsky all left the club over the summer. In their place, Ak Bars signed only three centers: veterans Alexei Byvaltsev and Andrei Stas, considered modest by KHL standards, and Kevin Hayes, a veteran of nearly 900 NHL games who has played for the United States national team and on whom fans are pinning high hopes.
Ak Bars head coach Anvar Gatiyatulin acknowledged the club faces roster problems but said it planned to strengthen the squad during the season and give more opportunities to players from its own academy.
A test for the Professor
Igor Larionov, nicknamed the Professor during his playing career, took charge of SKA Saint Petersburg in June last year after building an attacking side at Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod despite a modest roster. His first season with SKA was difficult.
SKA alternated winning and losing streaks all season, with the losing runs proving longer, including seven straight defeats in early 2026, something that had never happened to the club before. Weak Western Conference rivals meant SKA still reached the playoffs, but the club was swept 4-1 by CSKA Moscow, and few doubted Larionov would be dismissed.
Instead, SKA opted to keep Larionov and give him a second chance, overhauling both the coaching staff and the roster. To replace Khayrullin, the club signed Vasily Glotov and Vasily Atanasov, and added Zakhar Bardakov, returning from North America, and Swedish forward Linus Weissbach.
Hockey commentator Artem Batrak said the roster had changed dramatically and looked stronger on paper, adding that everyone could see it. SKA was the only KHL club to win every preseason match, giving fans and Larionov's supporters cautious optimism heading into the season.
Russians in China
The Shanghai Dragons remain one of the KHL's most unusual clubs. The Chinese team joined the league with fanfare in 2016 as Kunlun Red Star, spending its first four years splitting games between Beijing and Shanghai while setting KHL attendance lows. The pandemic forced a relocation to Mytishchi outside Moscow, where fan interest was minimal, results were poor, and the club appeared headed toward folding after a single playoff appearance.
Everything changed before last season, when the club moved to Saint Petersburg and was renamed the Shanghai Dragons. Average attendance grew by hundreds of percent, reaching around nine thousand by October last year, sixth highest in the entire KHL. Observers credit local interest in hockey, a successful rebrand, strong promotion, and outreach to the city's Chinese community, including students. On the ice, results still lagged, with the club finishing one spot outside the playoffs, some 25 points behind the West's eighth-place team.
Before this season, the club underwent a leadership shake-up, naming former star player Ilya Kovalchuk as president and his former Russia national teammate Yevgeni Artyukhin as general manager. Under them, Shanghai conducted an active transfer campaign, building a Russian-led roster with several standout imports rather than a squad of lesser-known North Americans.
Kovalchuk said he was confident the project had long-term prospects, citing the importance of China as a partner and the need for foreign clubs in the KHL to become genuinely competitive, saying the Dragons were capable of that.
The team is coached by promising Canadian Mitch Love, who developed as an assistant with the Washington Capitals. Alexander Ovechkin, who worked with Love, has spoken highly of him, making Shanghai a club worth watching this season.
Overseas help for the Belarusians
Another arrival from the NHL this season is Sergei Brylin, a product of CSKA's youth system in the 1990s and 2000s who made his name with the New Jersey Devils. He finished his playing career in Russia before returning to the United States, working his way up the coaching ranks to become a Devils assistant coach in 2022, a post he held for four years. This summer he was unexpectedly named head coach of Dynamo Minsk and of the Belarus national team.
Brylin said offers had come every off-season and that a coach needs to be ready for such a step. He said the Dynamo offer interested him greatly, citing the club's organisation, its strong regular season last year, and fans who fill the arena, adding that the transition has been fairly easy given the number of foreign players already on the roster.
Dynamo Minsk has played in the KHL since its founding and regularly reaches the playoffs but has never advanced past the quarterfinals. Last season came close to changing that: the club had a strong regular season, finishing second in the West, swept Dynamo Moscow 4-0 in the first playoff round, then was unexpectedly swept 0-4 by Ak Bars Kazan, a team that had struggled through the regular season. The result angered Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, the country's most prominent hockey fan, who called the team's play lousy.
Former head coach Dmitry Kvartalnov was not expected to be dismissed over that result, but he said Dynamo's management showed little interest in extending their work together. He moved on to reigning champion Lokomotiv, while Brylin now aims to bring his NHL experience home, or close to it.
