The first round of the current Continental Hockey League playoff draw has generated admiration and great interest from the public. Unpredictable outcomes of confrontations in almost every series, sensational underdog victories and no less unexpected failures of nominal favorites, bright hockey, as well as record numbers of matches, overtimes and goals scored – all this together woke up a frenzied appetite for the second round.

But nothing like this happened in the semi-finals of the conferences, and not even close.

Petersburg SKA didn’t give any series to the winners of the audience award from Nizhny Novgorod. Yes, Igor Larionov’s “Torpedo” was not afraid and gave the best regular season club a cool and spectacular fight, but the many times higher class of Roman Rotenberg’s wards turned out to be a key factor in the confrontation. Therefore, in terms of the result, the battle of St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod did not give intrigue, which cannot be said about the game itself.

Omsk Avangard did not feel any resistance from last year’s Gagarin Cup finalists – Metallurg Magnitogorsk never got out of the crisis and could offer absolutely nothing to its opponent. Even if we take into account the fact that Omsk won two of four victories in overtime, the superiority of the “hawks” was obvious.

The authors of the main sensation of the current playoff draw from “Admiral” fought with the last of their strength against the star “Ak Bars” and fought for a miracle until the final siren of the entire series. However, it was not destined to come true – during their last trip to Vladivostok, Kazan took their will into a fist and fully justified the status of the favorite, depriving Leonid Tambiev’s gang of even a tiny chance for a new sensation. Unfortunately or fortunately, the words of the Admiral’s mentor that the series would last up to seven matches did not come into contact with reality.

Formally, the intrigue remained only in the battle between CSKA and Lokomotiv. During the confrontation, Yaroslavl bounced back from a score of 1-3 and got to the decisive, seventh meeting. And if in the first six matches, the “railroad” one way or another imposed their game on the “army team”, and in some episodes they even dictated the conditions, then the seventh match showed the fundamental difference between the champion and the challenger. CSKA, so to speak, in the style of “Tampa Bay Lightning” sample of recent years has demonstrated the presence of a huge reserve of forces and resources that help to succeed even in the most seemingly critical situations. Game 7 is a prime example of this. The Red-Blues completely crushed the opponent and destroyed the very system of Igor Nikitin, which many have been talking about all season.

What’s in the dry matter? Another reason for discussions and disputes about the need to make fundamental changes.

On the one hand, we have come to fair results of the conference semi-finals. With all due respect to Torpedo and Admiral, as well as to Lokomotiv (unfortunately, today’s Metallurg did not give a reason to talk about a team that claims to be something high), for them the second round is the ceiling. Yes, getting at least one of this series to the final of the West or East was a beautiful story and an opportunity to believe in a miracle, and a nominal underdog would gather around him a lot of caring fans from all over the country who missed sensations. But SKA, CSKA, Ak Bars and Avangard are objectively the best clubs in the league right now. If either of them had been eliminated early on, the conference finals would have been inferior.

Everything worked out the way it should. We will see a new battle between the coaching staffs of Roman Rotenberg and Sergei Fedorov, and that’s great. Their fight last year turned out to be a success, and now some are hungry for a real revenge, others intend to repeat the success. We will also see great hockey classics in the East. Agree, the duel of experienced stars in the face of Alexander Radulov, Vadim Shipachev and Stanislav Galiev with no less stellar techies Vladimir Tkachev, Sergey Tolchinsky and Reed Bush looks much more attractive than posters “Who will find a gap in the possessions of Nikita Serebryakov” or “With what score will Metallurg be beaten?

On the other hand, there is again a feeling of marking time in one place. To a greater extent, this applies to the Western Conference. For the seventh time in the last nine seasons, CSKA and SKA will compete for a ticket to the Gagarin Cup final. Army derby has not just become a classic. Their confrontation in the decisive series of the West is predicted for years to come. And this is perhaps the main scourge of the conference. CSKA and SKA are out of reach for their other rivals. The Moscow and St. Petersburg army men have no competitors in terms of strength and power. Is this a problem for the two top clubs in the league? Not at all. The whole league? Quite.

The KHL is regularly compared with the NHL in one way or another. And overseas the level of competition is disproportionately high. Predicting even the finalists of the conferences in North America is definitely almost impossible, which cannot be said about the West in the KHL. How to solve this problem? It will not be possible to introduce drastic artificial restrictions on clubs: the league will not be able to do this on its own, and the leaders of the leading teams are unlikely to act to their own detriment. And it all comes down to a system with a cross playoff, which was actively lobbied last summer, but did not have time to finalize before the start of the season.

Will such a system give the expected result? No one can give a definitive answer, just speculation. But you need to start somewhere if there is a sincere desire and need to move forward.