On April 19, 2016, the next winner of the Gagarin Cup was determined. The 2015-2016 KHL season was very interesting and exciting for the viewer, the playoff matches of the tournament were in no way inferior in their intensity to the previous draws.
Metallurg Magnitogorsk won the 2016 Gagarin Cup playoffs. Ural hockey players have lifted the most prestigious club hockey trophy in Europe for the second time in history. In the final, the South Urals defeated the winners of the regular season of the Moscow “army team”.
Only in the seventh match of the final series was the winner of the 2016 Gagarin Cup determined. “Metallurg” in a foreign field was able to break the resistance of CSKA with a score of 3: 1. The real heroes in the decisive seventh match were Magnitogorsk forward Evgeny Timkin and defender Chris Lee. The first scored two goals: opening an account in the first period and hitting an empty net of “army men” at the end of the match. Chris Lee became the author of the second (winning) puck, “Metallurg”. The final score of the seventh confrontation of the Gagarin Cup final is 3: 1 in favor of the South Ural hockey players.
On the way to the final, Metallurg beat Avtomobilist Yekaterinburg in six matches in the quarterfinals (4: 2 in the series). At the next stage, the Novosibirsk “Siberia” was broken (the score was 4: 1). In the Eastern Conference final, Metallurg defeated Salavat Yulaev from Ufa in five matches.
The victory in the 2016 Gagarin Cup was a repetition of the result of two years ago for Metallurg. In 2014, the team of South Urals defeated Lev Prague in the final in seven matches. Thus, “Metallurg” became the third club in the KHL, which is a two-time winner of the prestigious trophy (other teams: Moscow “Dynamo” and Kazan “Ak Bars”).
At the end of the seventh match of the series with CSKA, the prize was awarded to the most valuable player in the 2016 KHL playoffs. It was Metallurg's captain and real leader Sergei Mozyakin.
