Season Structure
The league is divided into two conferences, East (with 12 teams) and West (with 14 teams), and further into two divisions per conference. During the regular season, each team plays 52 games: two games against each of the other teams and two extra games against a selected rival, normally the geographically closest team.
The eight top-ranked teams in each conference receive playoff berths. Within each conference, quarterfinals, semifinals and finals are played before the conference winners play against each other for the Gagarin Cup. The division winners are seeded first and second in their conference, based on their regular season record. All playoff rounds are played as best-of-seven series. In each round, the top seeded remaining team is paired with the lowest seeded team etc. In the playoffs, overtime periods last 20 minutes (or until a goal is scored). The number of overtime periods is not limited.
The 2013 season will introduce the Cup of Hope, a new consolation tournament for six teams from the Western Conference and four teams from the Eastern Conference who did not qualify for the playoffs. The winning team in the tournament will win the first overall pick in the KHL Junior Draft. The new tournament is intended to extend the season and help maintain interest in hockey in preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Read more about this topic: Kontinental Hockey League
Famous quotes containing the words season and/or structure:
“The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in its totality, in its structure: posterity discovers it in the stones with which he built and with which other structures are subsequently built that are frequently better—and so, in the fact that that structure can be demolished and yet still possess value as material.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)