Kovalchuk’s signing hardly signaled an exodus of N.H.L. players to the K.H.L., but it demonstrated the league’s increasing attractiveness — especially after dozens of players signed with teams during the last season’s lockout — and the deep pockets of at least some of the teams’ owners. More than a third of the league’s 700 players at any given time are non-Russians, including at last count 45 Canadians, 19 Americans and dozens of players from Europe, many of them veterans of the N.H.L., according to rosters still being completed.

“Our aim is not to make a barrier — or iron curtain — between the K.H.L. and the N.H.L.,” the league’s president, Aleksander I. Medvedev, said in an interview in his Moscow office, where he also serves as the head of Gazprom Export, a subsidiary of the state natural gas empire that is the league’s biggest patron. “We would like that players, depending on their circumstances and vision of the world, can play everywhere. It will make hockey better if more North Americans will come to play here, and vice versa.”

The bleeding of the best Russian players to the N.H.L. over the last two decades, beginning with Mogilny, who defected during the last years of the Soviet Union, dulled much of the enthusiasm from what many consider the national sport, but the league’s boosters are increasingly confident they have at least stanched the flow. The K.H.L., like the N.H.L. before it, is being accused of poaching the best players from smaller European national leagues with more lucrative contracts. It ultimately plans to expand to 32 teams, including Jokerit and at least one other European team.

Since the league’s inception in 2008 with 24 teams, the quality of play has improved, as has its following among fans, who are particularly ardent in smaller cities with few other sporting or entertainment options. The league’s cable television network, KHL TV, now has 11 million subscribers, according to league officials.

Even so, the league’s greatest challenge is a business model still shaped by a Soviet legacy and an uneven transition to a market economy. Tickets are comparatively inexpensive in Russia, as low as a few dollars, and many teams play in small or antiquated arenas they do not own or control, depriving them of added revenue from merchandise and concessions.

Instead, the teams rely on the financing from owners or sponsors, which include Russia’s biggest state-run or -controlled corporations, whose stakes and spending are far from transparent. They include Gazprom; Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, which owns CSKA in Moscow; Tatneft, the regional oil company in Tatarstan, which controls Ak Bars in Kazan; and industrial giants like the steel maker Severstal, whose team by the same name plays in Vologda, and MMK, the iron and steel works that controls Metallurg in Magnitogorsk. Other teams, including Admiral, are owned in part or whole by regional governments.