Another day in the KHL, another two head coaches get kicked

Yesterday led to resignation of two more head coaches in the KHL. This brings the turnover of coaches up to six, or 25%, and we're still only 1/3 into the season.

Last night, Atlant's CEO Andrei Berebko and sports director Ravil Iskhakov last night announced that Fedor Kanareikin has resigned as headcoach and his assistant Valeri Bragin would assume the post. The announcement followed Atlant's 0-6 defeat to Salavat on Monday. The resignation of Kanareikin, who has coached Atlant for two years, does not come as a surprise. Atlant has struggled ever since the pre-season, and the expensive team reinforcements with Zherdev, Novotny, Gerber and Semin hasn't had any effect. The team has lost six of its nine latest games and firing Kanareikin seemed to be the only option left. Kanareikin became the head coach of Atlant on 4 January 2008. During his time as head coach, Atlant won 71 games and lost 33.

Meanwhile, Sibir Novosibirsk also kicked their head coach, Vladimir Semoyonov. Sibir has 20 points in 19 games and is well outside the playoff-zone. Sibir's fans have wanted to get rid of Semenov for a long time, and in the end the patience of Sibir's management simply fizzled out. Sibir will now be looking for a new coach. There's not a whole lot of options left, but in the meantime Andrei Tarasenko will act as a working head coach.

Meanwhile. There will be more coaches to go in the coming weeks. Dinamo Riga's Julius Šupler could very well be the next in line.

One coach that is relatively safe is Zinetula Bilyaletdinov, the coach of KHL Champion, Ak Bars. Ak Bars is in deep crisis and is off to its worst start ever in the RSL/KHL. After yesterday's 2-5 loss to Metallurg Novokuznetsk, Ak Bars dropped out of the playoff zone and is now ranked 17th in a combined KHL table. Bilyaletdinov, however, still has a tremendous amount of reputation in stock, and Ak Bars would probably rather prefer to kick the whole squad of players before they kick Bilyaletdinov. Swedish goaltender, Mikael Tellqvist could very well become the next player to be released from the team. The speculation about Tellqvist has been going on for some time--ever since the preseason actually. It didn't take long before Tellqvist lost his position as starting goaltender, a position that went to the young and promising, Stanislav Galimov, but since Galimov has also struggled recently, Ak Bars is looking for a replacement for Tellqvist. Here, Ak Bars has zoomed in on Lukko Rauma's Petri Vehanen. Vehanen has had tremendous success in the Finnish SM-Liiga with a GAA of 1.45 and SVS% of 94.9 in 13 games for table leader, Lukko. Vehanen's agent, Krister Kaukinen has confirmed that something is in the making.

Taken from internationalhockey