A look inside MHL All-Star weekend

The All-Star weekend started early on Friday when from the morning players began to take part in other activities. Most part of the players went to Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, 4 players including both captains from East and West team went to an orphan house. MHL had a program “MHL to kids” where they visited Cancer Centres before the big events. Similar to the charity work in the NHL.

This year MHL decided to organize quite doubtful contests, e.g. to take more phone numbers from the girls in a mall, or a cook contest where West captain Roman Lyubimov and East captain Yevgeny Grigorenko tried to cook a dinner. It was so simple contest because one has pork, other has a chicken and the main aim was who is better in frying it. The league tried to count the score with these events and it was +1 for the West, but no one really paid attention to it.

Next day opened with alumni games Legends of Metallurg Magnitogorsk against team Gazpromexport where former players and some top personal played like KHL president Alexander Medvedev. After a low attendance in Moscow region at this kind of game it was surprising to see about 6400 people here. Gazpromexport won against the Metallurg Legends 6-4. For the Metallurg team the current head coaches of Metallurg Magnitogorsk Fyodor Kanareikin and Steel Foxes Yevgeny Koreshkov played. MHL prepared before this game a lot. For example they found a musician who wrote a hymn for MHL. It was Russian rock-musician Arthur Berkut, ex-vocal of Ariya band that’s popular in Russia.

The special press-conference was organized before the Challenge Cup where managing director of the league Dmitry Yefimov told that next season Junior World Cup will be again held in Omsk and the number of the participants will be extended to 12 teams. It’s known that it will be teams from Finland, Denmark and Norway. They told about how everything is well-organized here and it was another success of MHL.

In the All-Star game game itself the East team had a 2-goal lead at 31:31 when in first Anton Kapotov from Kuznetskie Medvedi scored with a one-timer in power play and Ansel Galimov's penalty shot who was stopped by two West D-men who played in power-play. Minute later West team used their chance with Roman
Lyubimov's tip-in goal. In the end of the second Nikita Nesterov made a mistake in his own zone and Maxim Kvitchenko used a chance to tie the game at 38:00. At 45:15 Roman Lyubimov pulled his team ahead Pavel Chernov and Nikita Gusev again assisted him. The game was closed with 27 seconds remaining with an empty-net goal by Nikolai Bogomolov.

The West team won the second Challenge Cup in MHL history and now they lead 2-1 over East team. MHL did a great job to make a show here they brought here a lot of equipment it was looking good but sometimes it’s difficult understand for fans why a certain player get to the All-Star game. In the first season they chose other first-lines than fans voted. MHL had a good idea to invite players from all teams, but how many real stars can grow up from the players who were here? There was a one young star Nikita Gusev who showed a good performance at last WJC in Calgary. There were only two more players that played at this WJC Nikita Nesterov and Ildar Isangulov.

But there is one moment of how MHL works. They took a most part of their people in Magnitogorsk, had about three people who were responsable for the media, but it was difficult to understand who is responsable for what. For every big event MHL organizes a press-tour when they take journalists to the plane, usually they’re from their partner media (one website and one newspaper). Other media can face with a problem that they don’t know about the schedule of a day, when will be press conference or tours to plants or smth else. This weekend I faced with a problem that the media manager didn’t send a schedule and refused to send me or tell it correctly. A schedule is not a big problem but it’s not acceptable for a league which is planning to become successful, which is telling everyone that they’re pioneers in Russian hockey business, that they’re great, to have a media manager that didn’t want to work, that can allow herself to call a journalist with threats that he will rot here in Magnitogorsk, that they took him in a plane out of pity, if he will tell this top management about how media manager didn’t work again.

Does it mean that if you’re in their tour you don’t disturb anyone and write about this league only “good” or “very good” without a critical point of view?

 

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