The KHL

Reasonable observers of the hockey universe have known for some time now that the KHL was a gigantic joke of a league, propped up by the worst kind of plutocrats, and in which Russians could feel their particular brand of national pride about luring away one actual good NHL player ever.

Current points leader in the KHL: Alex Radulov, who is an NHL washout. No. 2: Ilya Kovalchuk, who is that aforementioned actual good player. No. 3: Stevie Moses, who is... who?

No, you don't know who Stevie Moses is, unless you saw a lot of middling college hockey teams three or four years ago. Moses's career high in points at the NCAA level was 35 in 37 games for UNH; in the KHL this year he has 28-18-46 in 40 for Jokerit. He also went 2-0-2 in his only eight games at the AHL level several years ago. What I'm saying is the KHL is a Good League.

It's been said that the Russian economy is not so much an actual economy but rather an infrastructure built on the power of the nation's oil exporting business. And now that the oil industry has gone to pot, and the Western sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine have really taken hold, the ruble has collapsed, losing close to 50 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar over the course of 2014. And all of a sudden, lots of teams aren't able to pay their players any more; at least, not in any way resembling their original agreements.

Players who were dumb enough to take their pay in rubles have seen the value of those checks decline sharply, as you might expect, meaning that even if they're getting paid the same number of rubles, they're making potentially hundreds of thousands of actual dollars less per year. That's if they're getting paid at all. A number of teams have been forced to waive or trade players, even good ones, due to financial concerns that threaten their very existence. Three teams or more may be on the verge of bankruptcy.

This week the league's president, Dmitri Chernyshenko, announced that the league moving forward would exist mostly to support the Russian national team (that is, “tell foreign players to take a hike”) and examine just how many teams it should actually have if some can't be financially stable (that is, “fold clubs that are losing money”). There are only 28 teams in the league, and 15 have negative goal differentials, so maybe that's not such a bad idea.

But that has to more or less officially end the idea that this league has ever or would ever pose a real threat to the NHL. They got Ilya Kovalchuk, though. Gotta give 'em a lot of credit.