Geography, apparently, isn’t a strong suit among the NHL’s top suits.

Kontinental Hockey League president Alexander Medvedev said he would send an atlas to NHL vice president Bill Daly who — along with his boss, Gary Bettman — has expressed concern about Siberia as a potential site for future NHL contests, due to the region’s location and freezing temperatures.

“Let (Daly) take a look at where Siberia starts on the map,” Medvedev said. “We have good airline carriers and air traffic control in (Russia). They themselves travel far and wide for games in North America.

“For logistical purposes, of course, it would be better to play the games in the European region of Russia. However, from Moscow it’s only a 2 ½ hour flight to Omsk (named as a potential site for an NHL game).”

The KHL president could have added that in 2011, the Siberian region — which covers 77 per cent of Russia — has several modern cities with all the amenities the West once claimed as its own.

Yet many North American hockey officials and fans are still largely ignorant of the league considered the world’s second best, and the area in which it operates. But if Medvedev has his way, that’s all going to change.

ESPN3, a broadband network for live sports programming, is already showing one KHL game a week this season. Medvedev is negotiating to get the league even more exposure through a TV deal with ESPN2 for next season.

In addition to running the KHL, the Russian billionaire is also an executive with Gazprom, the natural gas company which owns SKA St. Petersburg. That KHL club boasts former NHLers Alexei Yashin, Sergei Zubov, Maxim Afinogenov, Denis Grebeshkov, and Sergei Brylin in its lineup.

Last season, when former Detroit Red Wings assistant coach Barry Smith guided St. Petersburg to a first-place regular-season finish, almost every home game was sold out. But the team was ousted in the first round of the playoffs, leading to a parting of ways between Smith and the club.

This year, regular-season attendance was only in the range of 5,000 to 12,000, even though St. Petersburg finished in a tie for second place in the Western Conference. A game with arch-rival CSKA Moscow drew 9,400 fans to the 12,300-seat Ice Palace, while two games in the first round of the playoffs averaged 11,300.

Partly to blame is the city’s top-notch soccer club, Zenit St. Petersburg. The hockey club has trouble drawing when the reigning Russian Premier League champions play a home game.

Indeed, fans in St. Petersburg like a front-runner, though the hockey team does its best to offer entertainment value. The SKA fan club sits at one end of the rink chanting and waving banners with its mascot, “Fire Horse”. Cheerleaders patrol every aisle, waving pom-poms.

But as with the NHL, attendance figures vary from team to team.

In Riga, the capital of Latvia, attendance for Dynamo Riga is in the 8,000-9,000 range at Arena Riga, which seats 10,300. However, more than 11,000 fans somehow jammed their way in for a September exhibition game against the Phoenix Coyotes.

Former New York Rangers centre Sergei Nemchinov, who coaches CSKA Moscow, says the old army team’s building sells out its 5,500-seat arena, if the visiting team is a contender. If not, there can be as few as 2,500 fans coming out to games.

If those figures seem low, it’s worth considering the economics of the region.

Season tickets for Atlant Moscow Oblast — based in Mytishchi, just outside Moscow — can be had for 1,260 rubles, which averages out to about $1.50 per game. But the most expensive tickets at the CSKA Ice Palace go for about $50 a game. To put things in perspective, the average salary in Moscow is the equivalent of about $1,000 a month.

Local newspaper Sport Express recently said “(t)here is no comparison in the standard of living in Russia and North America. For many people, where KHL clubs are based, admission to hockey games is too expensive. For them, it is a serious problem for the family budget.”

The story’s headline: “To buy a car or go to a hockey game?”

Yet the league has managed to attract NHL veterans such as Jaromir Jagr, Alexei Yashin and Sergei Fedorov, paying them salaries in the range of $1 million to $5 million. For the most part, though, the KHL has failed to bring over NHL stars in their prime.

One exception is Alexander Radulov, who broke a contract with the Nashville Predators to sign for more money with Salavat Yulaev Ufa. Radulov was named the KHL’s player of the year last season, and won the regular-season scoring title this year with 20 goals and 80 points in 54 games.

That’s not to say the league doesn’t rely heavily on imports. There were only five Russians among the KHL’s top 20 scorers this season, along with six Czechs, two Canadians, two Americans and one player each from Sweden, Slovakia, Finland, Norway and Latvia.

The four North Americans in the top 10 — Brandon Bochenski, Matt Ellison, Ryan Vesce and Charles Linglet — have played a total of only 223 NHL games between them, although all are at least 27 years old. They have spent a lot of time bouncing around the minor leagues.

But the league has also proved a solid destination for some more highly-decorated former NHLers.

Six-time Vezina Trophy winner Dominik Hasek found the KHL, with its puck possession-style of game, an ideal place to wind down his career — even though his club, Spartak Moscow, was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

“There’s less shooting here, which I like!” smiled Hasek, who turned 46 on Jan. 29.

Jaromir Jagr tipped the scales at the heaviest of his career when he left the NHL to play for Avangard Omsk in 2008.

“I found out quickly that if you’re going to play in this league on the big ice surface, you’ve got to lose some pounds,” he said. “You have to skate more, there’s not a lot of play along the boards.”

Sergei Brylin, who earned two Stanley Cup rings with the New Jersey Devils, maintains a home in the state while playing for SKA.

“The skill level here is pretty good,” Brylin said. “The top four or five teams could easily play in the NHL.”

Former Los Angeles Kings defenceman Kevin Dallman, currently with Barys Astana, notes that the KHL season is just as long as the NHL’s campaign.

“But there’s less physical play and less chance of getting hurt,” said Dallman, whose Kazakhstan-based club is planning to build a new arena. “I don’t want to knock the AHL, but this league’s one step ahead of it.”

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Vancouver native Chris Holt, a New York Rangers draft pick in 2003, signed to play goal for Dynamo Riga after playing for the AHL’s Binghamton Senators last season. The club provided apartments for Holt — as well as Canadians Mark Hartigan and Brock Trotter — in the Panorama Plaza, a skyscraper that they say is ultra-modern.

“I live on the 22nd floor,” Holt said. “It has a view of the city’s downtown. It’s breathtaking. . . . It would have to be a really great opportunity in the NHL for me to leave Riga.

“The biggest difference here is there’s no fast food. If you go out for the evening to have a nice sit-down experience, you’re there for the whole night.”

Russian hockey has seen its share of novelties too, if only for a short while.

During the NHL lockout in 2004-05, stars such as Dany Heatley, Vincent Lecavalier and Alexei Kovalev played for Ak Bars Kazan in the Russian Superleague, the KHL’s predecessor. The team decided to put its speed to the test, playing a friendly match against a local bandy — sometimes called “Russian hockey” — club on an outdoor ice surface measuring 328 feet by 164 feet.

Perhaps accustomed to the 200-foot by 85-foot NHL rinks, some of the Ak Bars players found themselves sucking wind, as their team was shellacked 7-2.

The relative success of the four-year-old league has had some thinking expansion, although Medvedev said earlier this year that the KHL has no plans for expansion next season. But since then, the financially troubled Hannover Scorpions of the German League have indicated an interest in the KHL. Likewise, clubs from the Czech Republic and Slovakia investigated joining the KHL last year, but their national federations vetoed the move.

But foreign federations aren’t the KHL’s only worry; its image has also been tarnished by the hooliganism on display by Vityaz Chekhov, one of the league’s weakest teams.

Last season Vityaz — which means “Warriors” in English — instigated a brawl during a game with Avangard Omsk, which resulted in 840 penalty minutes and the game being suspended. It all started when former Washington Capitals tough guy Darcy Verot fired the puck at an Avangard player before the opening whistle.

Then in December, Vityaz initiated another free-for-all against Avangard only six seconds into the game. The game was played to its completion, but Verot and another former NHLer, Josh Gratton, were question by police afterward and suspended for 12 and 15 games, respectively.

The KHL has since warned Vityaz — which uses the team slogan “Who comes to us with the sword shall perish by the sword” — that it needs to clean up its act or risk being booted from the league. Avangard GM Anatoly Bardin has demanded a ban on Vityaz, telling Sport-Express at the time that he was considering legal action against Gratton and Verot.

But another NHL transplant on the Vityaz roster at the time, Chris Simon, showed no regrets.

“This is hockey, guys! We hate (Avangard) with pride,” he told the website sportbox.ru. “We will always show emotions in matches against this opponent. This is real fighting spirit!”

Boris Maiorov, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and former Soviet team captain, said Verot’s tactics are nothing new.

“In my time (the 1960s) the Canadians quite often pulled such tricks before games with the Soviet team,” he said in an interview published on the Russian Hockey Federation’s website last year.

“They skated across the red line to purposely grab you, push you or block your way.”

Perhaps the NHL and KHL — an ocean, and seemingly a world, apart — aren’t so different after all.

Two part series: A league of their own

Wednesday: The KHL: A league determined to grow

Thursdays: Junior hockey gets organized in Russia

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