Kontinental Hockey League president Alexander Medvedev said Monday that his league will play regular season games at the under-construction Barclays Center in the heart of Brooklyn, according to a report in SovSport.
KHL To Play Regular Season Games At Brooklyn’s Barclays Center
Yahoo!‘s Puck Daddy blog featured a translation of Medvedev’s comments regarding the KHL’s first presentation in front of a North American audience.
“We decided that when the basketball club [the New Jersey Nets, owned by Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov] finishes building its arena in Brooklyn, KHL Legends Game and regular season games will be held there. We are continuing to improve the relationship between the KHL and the NHL. I am hoping that the situation with [Alex] Radulov will not spoil it.”
Gary Bettman and the NHL are apparently on board with the KHL attempting to promote its product in North America, and Brooklyn makes sense for the KHL in more ways than one.
Nets owner Prokhorov is Russian and has deep ties in the business community there, and he’s also a major investor in the new Brooklyn arena. There’s also a large Russian and Ukrainian population in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay, so the audience is certainly there for the KHL.
Barclays Center was not built for hockey and thus has a substantially smaller capacity with an ice rink installed than when set up for basketball, but the New York Islanders will play a preseason game there this fall. It's possible that the Islanders will move into the building permanently at some point, but that process still has plenty of variables involved.
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