This story starts with cracks in the foundation, literal and metaphorical. After years of dominating the KHL to an extreme degree with a team stacked with so many players, they didn’t have room to play them all, SKA St. Petersburg was merely very good this season. They lost Ilya Kovalchuk to the Kings, Pavel Datsyuk might finally be showing his age, and they had tough competition in attracting former NHLers moving to the KHL.
The literal cracks happened in Omsk, where the new arena suddenly started to fall apart, and the team, Avangard, had to find a new place to play.