Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

It's very easy to think of the KHL as a backwater league not worth the attention of anyone outside former Soviet Bloc countries. The league collects players who, for some reason or another, can't hack it in the NHL; and when highlights do make it across the oceans they seem in large part to show a deeply inferior and laughably weird league.

The number of horror stories you hear about the KHL is also high. Players not getting paid. Players maybe getting blackmailed. The shadowy specter of vaguely scary and definitely armed oligarchs hanging over the league's richest teams while the poorest field teams that would kill to have a few has-beens to mix in with their never-wases. The abominable playing, medical, and travel conditions. And so on.

For everything that's wrong with the NHL, at least it isn't the KHL.

The problem with the world's greatest league is that it is intransigent when it comes to so many things that make the league safer; and even when it does move, all anyone really does is complain.

There's already been so much curmudgeonry this season about hybrid icing that you'd think a blown call is worse than a broken ankle. The fighting debate is growing obnoxious because its most vocal supporters can't just admit they want to watch MMA on ice. And we're about three years away from purists bemoaning the influx of visors for making the sport to European or something.

So when there's a rash of players being stretchered off the ice as a result of dirty hits, and everyone starts talking about how important it is to get the rats out of the game forever, the number of solutions offered for doing so remains more or less at zero, more or less steadfastly. "You just can't force these guys out of the game!" is a pretty common cry these days, even as everyone agrees that maybe you probably should.

The problem is that the league has shown little interest in trying to legislate them out.

The last two lockouts have come with all involved acknowledging that the NHL had all the power, and it used that to foist all sorts of draconian rollbacks of players' rights, while leaving alone supplementary discipline in most ways.

Remember the $2,500 max fine? At least they got that bumped up to a cool $10,000.

But now the players have more rights to appeal the lengthiest suspensions — those of six games or more — to higher authorities than Brendan Shanahan; Patrick Kaleta, a guy who deserves to be run out of the game with pitchforks and torches if ever there was one, is using that to appeal his 10-game ban for his seventh bit of supplemental discipline in the last three season. Seventh. Your seventh time appearing before that board in your entire career should just get you outright banned, and Kaleta gets to walk around thinking 10 games is too many.

The NHL Department of Player Safety effectively found itself castrated in this regard, and therefore viewable only as bread and circus to the larger, league-wide problems it is in theory meant to sort out, by Raffi Torres. Another among the repeatest of repeat offenders, Torres just about tried to decapitate Marian Hossa in the playoffs and Brendan Shanahan had the guts to actually throw the guy a 25-game suspension.

It was bold but it was necessary, because plays like that from guys like that have no place in the sport, and that's the only way anyone is ever going to learn. That would have included 12 regular-season games the next season, but Gary Bettman rolled that back to eight. This served as a pretty strong reminder to everyone that the league didn't actually care about this kind of thing all that much. Not really, anyway.

Which of course brings us to today, and Kaleta thinking 10 games is entirely too many even as illegal plays, ugly and injurious, happen with greater frequency. The most basic question you can ask at that point is, "How dare he appeal that?" You get why he's doing it but the gall it takes to actually follow through is considerable. The NHL has no way of saying no, and will therefore probably allow this thing to continue in perpetuity until something very serious indeed happens to one of the league's biggest stars as a result of such a player.