Panin is confident that it will not be difficult for older players to play 68 games in the KHL regular season

The captain of Salavat Yulaev, 36-year-old Grigory Panin, believes that it will not be a problem for older players to play 68 games in the KHL regular season.

The 2022/2023 regular season KHL season starts on September 1, 2022, will last until February 26, 2023 and will include 164 game days and 748 matches, and each club will play a record 68 matches for the first part of the championship.

– In the new KHL season there will be 68 games in the regular season, and all the guys and coaches say cheerfully into the recorder: “It’s better to play than to train.” But due to the number of games, the pre-season has also changed, there will be a minimum of time for recovery between games. Will such a season, especially for older children, become an experiment on the body?

“You know, I’ll tell you something like this. All age players, all veterans who remained in the KHL – these guys are preparing themselves very decently for the season. And this is a very good example for young people. Adult guys who are in Salavat and other teams, I know that they are professional and very sensitive to their bodies. So I don’t see any tragedy in this.

Yes, here you will need to think about recovery, how you recover after the game, but I think that there will be no problems with this either. But in principle, in general, there has been talk about this for a long time – that it is necessary to increase the number of games. Because the very youth that we all really hope for, all the Panarins, Ovechkins and other guys, they get out of the game when there are a large number of matches at a high level. They get their game experience, especially in the playoff games, they are tempered there,” Panin said.Championship“.

In the regular season, there will be one pause for the matches of the national team – from December 12 to 18, 2022, which will be preceded by the Week of Hockey Stars in Chelyabinsk on December 10 and 11.