«Metallurg» in the final of the Gagarin Cup! There won't be a better series in the KHL season

Ural confrontation between “Metallurg” and “Avtomobilist” — decoration of the entire KHL playoffs. Mentors Andrei Razin and Nikolai Zavarukhin were united by a sad moment — they never won the seventh meeting in the Gagarin Cup.
Moreover, the head coach of the Yekaterinburg team was relegated quite recently: last season his team lost to… “Metallurg”. That match turned out to be dramatic: Avtomobilist led 3:1 at home, but lost the advantage and lost in overtime. Therefore, for both specialists, today’s battle in Magnitogorsk was much more important than before.
Continental Hockey League (KHL) April 15, 2024 • starts at 17:00 CompletedMetallurg MgRussia3: 2AvtomobilistRussia
08:40 • Dmitry Silantiev (Roman Kantserov)
14:19 • Danila Yurov ( Roman Kantserov, Egor Yakovlev)
23:52 • Denis Zernov (Dmitry Silantyev)
19:53 • Maxim Denezhkin (Sergey Zborovsky)
24:14 • Maxim Denezhkin (Danil Romantsev)

See all goals
Andrey Vladimirovich was successful in it. Razin hoped that the seventh game would become a match of life for his team. His hopes came true.

The hosts supported the trend of the entire series, when the teams took victories one by one. Metallurg looked better during the match and deservedly achieved success. At the same time, the teams made too many mistakes for the seventh game of the playoff series. Between them, Magnitogorsk and Avtomobilist collected seven deletions. It is noteworthy that when playing in the minority, both teams, on the contrary, acted very competently and did not give the opponent a chance.
In terms of playing at equal strength, Metallurg is one of the best clubs of the entire KHL season. Andrei Razin’s team confirmed this today. Already in the first period, the Magnitogorsk team scored two goals. First, Roman Kantserov and Dmitry Silantyev mercilessly punished the Avtomobilist defense for a blunder in the middle zone and carried out a perfect counterattack with a goal.

And then Danila Yurov skillfully figured out the episode when he was left all alone in a killer position.

But the score could have been larger in favor of Magnitogorsk. Even before the first goal, the home team created at least three truly scoring chances at the opponent’s goal, but either Vladimir Galkin coped with the shots, or the guests were frankly lucky.

To some extent, luck played for “Auto” in two scoring episodes of the Ekaterinburg team . Both goals by Maxim Denezhkin, who until this day had last scored in early September last year, came from not the most obvious game situations.

But this was not enough. The goal of Denis Zernov, who scored 5 goals in the last three games of the series in a row, became victorious and decisive for Metallurg in the entire series. In the third period, “Magnitka” played so competently that “Avtomobilist”, which went through the entire playoffs due to other people’s mistakes, never found a chance for a comeback.

3:2 in the match and 4-3 in the best KHL playoff series. In his debut season as the head coach of Metallurg, Andrei Razin led his team to the final of the Gagarin Cup, where Lokomotiv had already waited for the Magnitogorsk team. The final series of the tournament starts on April 18 in Magnitogorsk.