Russian hockey brawl for the ages: Game called when everyone is ejected

Jan 11, 2010, 10:00 AM EST

Russia’s new Continental Hockey League (CHL) is off to a dubious start, you might say. You may recall in 2008, when a 19-year-old player collapsed during a game and later died from heart failure. And now this; a brawl unprecedented in Russian hockey, in which 691 penalty minutes were doled out, and so many players were thrown out or penalized that the game had to be abandoned. Bonus: The game lasted only 3:27, and Jaromir Jagr of the Pittsburgh Penguins was involved. Best hockey fight ever? You be the judge.
Video following the jump.

It was pretty much wall-to-wall fighting between the teams Vityaz Chekhov and Avangard Omsk, which began with Vityaz’s Brendan Sugden squaring off with Avangard’s Alexander Svitov.

Order was restored but at 3:34 more fighting broke out, and eight more players, four from each side, were penalized.

There was another free-for-all at 3:37, involving players on the ice and seven more in the penalty boxes, including Jagr. That left three Avangard skaters on the ice and one on the bench, and three Vityaz skaters on the ice and three on the bench.

The team ran out of players at 3:39, when Avangard’s Anton Babchuk and Jakub Klepisch were penalized for leaving the bench and Vityaz’s Viktor Bobrov and Rustam Bakhriddinov took 10-minute misconducts.

Of course the account of the match is much better when translated from the original Russian. From Oboz Sports:

A rare event in the history of hockey: match interrupted due to lack of hockey players. In “regulyarke” CHL Chekhov Vityaz and Omsk Avangard played only 3 minutes 39 seconds! Brawls started even before the match, rolling to and immediately after the starting whistle, they grew into a mass slaughter. As a result, in the fourth minute on ice no more players. Under the rules, the match may be held if the platform is at least one goalkeeper and three field hockey. So many artists both clubs failed to score.

The CHL was formed in 2008 with teams from Russia and other former Soviet republics of Belarus, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and has already seen its share of controversy.

Nineteen-year-old Avangard forward Alexei Cherepanov, the first round pick of the New York Rangers, collapsed during the game in Chekhov on Oct. 13, 2008, and later died from heart failure.