SPORT

SKA In Playoff Despair

By Christopher Hamilton

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

Salavat Yulayev from Ufa edged SKA 3-2 in a shoot-out finish of game three of the first round of the Russian Hockey Super League playoffs Wednesday, sweeping the St. Petersburg team 3-0 in the best-of-five series.

Yulayev scored two unanswered goals to force overtime, and held on through overtime eventually edging SKA 3-2 in shoot-out victory at St. Petersburg’s Ice Palace.

“We didn’t start out the way we wanted,” Salavat Yulayev head coach Sergei Mikhalev said. “It wasn’t a particularly active game and we ended up trailing early, but we pulled ourselves together and took it into overtime and were lucky to win the shootout. Even though we swept them in this series, SKA played with a lot of character and held us close in two games. It’s a solid team.”

SKA took an early lead when fan favorite Maxim Sushinsky scored at 15:35 of the first period.

With three minutes left in the second period, Mikhail Chernov extended SKA’s lead to 2-0 when he one-timed a shot from the slot past Ufa goalie Andrei Mezin. Alexander Drozdetsky crossed the puck behind the Ufa net to Valery Khlebnikov who fed it out to Chernov.

SKA tried to keep the momentum going in the third frame but things slowly began to fall apart. With SKA pressuring on a powerplay, Salavat Yulaev’s Ilya Zubov came up with the loose puck in the neutral zone and managed to score a short hanged goal. He rushed the SKA net and took a shot which SKA netminder Sergei Belov stopped, but failed to contain. The puck inched slowly behind Belov — almost as if in slow motion — and slid over the goal line as fans yelled out in horror. Igor Volkov evened the score with 4:40 left in regulation with a wrist shot that beat Belov to the far corner.

Salavat Yulaev narrowly defeated SKA 2-1 in overtime in game one, before man handling them 4-2 in game two. Both games were held in Ufa.

SKA St. Petersburg’s season ended much like it began — with high hopes dashed.

Despite a productive offseason, adding much needed depth to the team, SKA struggled at the start of the season. Head coach Boris Mikhailov was sacked in October by the team’s new, Gazprom-established management and replaced with Yury Leonev, who did little to solve the team’s problems. SKA ended the 2006-2007 season in 14th place, one notch down from last year.

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