KHL 2026/27 (M)

The KHL was founded in 2008 to replace the Russian Superleague, and it was born with an explicit ambition: to stop being a national championship and become European hockey's reference competition. It started with twenty-four teams from four countries and at its peak had clubs in Finland, Latvia, Slovakia, Croatia and China at the same time.

Today the map is shorter. The twenty-two clubs are split between Russia, with nineteen, and one apiece in Belarus, Kazakhstan and China. It remains by some distance the widest league in world hockey: between its most westerly and most easterly club there are more time zones than between Lisbon and Novosibirsk.

The roll of honour is unusually spread for a league with this gap in budgets. CSKA Moscow, Ak Bars Kazan and Metallurg Magnitogorsk have three titles each and none has pulled clear; Lokomotiv Yaroslavl have just added a second. In eighteen editions the Gagarin Cup has changed hands almost every year.

The 2025/26 final between Lokomotiv Yaroslavl and Ak Bars Kazan was a series with no momentum: neither side won two games in a row until the very end. Lokomotiv opened with a 3-1 at home, Ak Bars answered 5-1 two days later, and from there the series turned on away wins.

On 15 May Lokomotiv won 4-1 in Kazan, Ak Bars hit back 2-1 on the 17th, and on the 19th the Yaroslavl side went 3-2 up with a 4-1 on their own ice. Game six, again in Kazan, finished 2-3: four wins to two and the Gagarin Cup back in Yaroslavl on 21 May.

It was the club's second title and came through a sixteen-team playoff played best of seven from the first round. Across all rounds the previous campaign had run to eight hundred and twenty-five games, with almost half of them decided by a single goal.

The 2026/27 regular season is 748 games: twenty-two clubs playing sixty-eight each, from 5 September to 20 March. It is a calendar of almost seven months with no long break, international windows cutting the rhythm, and teams crossing the country to play every two or three days.

Lokomotiv defend and Ak Bars arrive with a rematch pending, but the league has more than two contenders: CSKA and Metallurg share the title record and SKA St Petersburg remain the club with the most financial muscle in eastern Europe. The gap between first and eighth in each conference is usually settled in the final week of the regular season.

Geography shapes the year more than anything else. The Eastern Conference clubs — Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Novosibirsk — pile up thousands of flight kilometres that the western sides never face, and that load shows in February and March, exactly when the playoff places are handed out.

The twenty-two clubs are split into two conferences, East and West, and each into two divisions: Bobrov and Tarasov in the west, Chernyshev and Kharlamov in the east. The schedule is not symmetrical — you play your division rivals more often than the other conference — so the overall table cannot be read like a straight round-robin.

Eight teams per conference make the playoffs, sixteen in all, and every round is best of seven: first round, conference quarter-finals, conference final and the Gagarin Cup final. That is four series won to lift it, and it explains why home advantage matters so much in a tournament where travel is measured in time zones.

There is a detail of hockey that changes predictions and is worth keeping in mind: a game cannot end level. If the sides are tied after sixty minutes, there is sudden-death overtime and, failing that, a shootout — and the winning goal counts on the scoreboard. That is why odd totals show up far more often than even ones, and why a total-goals band does not spread here the way it does in any other sport.