ASTANA – As the Continental Hockey League’s (KHL) regular season wound to a close, Barys Astana played four matches away.
The team has brought home seven points, half of those for grabs. This result has secured Barys a place in the Gagarin Cup playoffs for the seventh time in the league’s seven seasons.
Two of the Astana-based team’s last three regular season matches came against Metallurg Novokuznetsk and Sibir Novosibirsk. Having secured a clean sheet, Barys won both away games, 2-0 and 1-0.
The only goal scored in the match against Sibir came from Kevin Dallman of Barys, the first Canadian-born player representing the national team of Kazakhstan. This helped the team take the 5th position in the KHL’s Eastern Conference. With this effort, Dallman’s record in KHL’s seven seasons has reached 300 points (113 scores and 187 assists) in 380 matches played. This makes him the first ever defender to secure that result.
Dallman’s performance helped Barys take fifth position in the KHL’s Eastern Conference.
In the first round of the play-offs, Barys will meet its principle rival, Avangard Omsk.
The first two games will be played in Omsk on Feb. 28 and March 1. The following matches will be hosted by the Kazakhstan Ice Arena on March 3 and 4. To go through, a team needs to secure four wins in the series.
