So the KHL dropped the first puck yesterday... This season China has a team in the second-best league. Inaugural seasons are usually pretty rough, but it will be a blessing to the sport if the Chinese become interested in the fastest game on ice (I ain't talkin bout bandy).
I like the scheduling they do since the first game is a rematch of the last year's game 7 final except one team lost its best players (Radulov to Montreal and Zaitsev to Toronto) and the winner continued to dominate. It's weird that the World Cup is going to decimate most of the good KHL teams; it should make for an interesting dynamic and give some dark horse teams some real steam. I wish the NHL would do this with the Olympics - let the best players go and play at the Olympics but let the season continue. Of course, the greedy guts managers would weasel it so they kept their best players, because management ruins everything.
This is literally the only thing that could ever convince me to go to China (other than a winter Olympics). Incidentally, the Beijing team has 4 Canadians but only 1 Chinese player. There used t be a KHL rule that all non-Russian teams had at least 5 players from their home country, but I guess they dropped the rule.
