Regular season: new attendance records and the advantage of going young

The 12th KHL regular season had several records occurring in different situations: starting from the increased employment of young players and finishing with an even steeper increase in the matches' unpredictability. Of course, this excitement had a significant impact on the attendance numbers.

The 2019-20 regular season is now history, and it's time to summarize some of the results.

In the latest few seasons, the average attendance is growing year after year, and this time around, it was no exception, setting a new record with almost six thousand and a half fans visiting each game.

In the latest three seasons, Ak Bars, Vityaz, Dynamo Moscow, Kunlun Red Star, SKA, and Torpedo recorded an increase in their average attendance, with Barys, Sochi, and Spartak having a five-year growth instead.

However, Avangard (mostly due to its forced move to Balashikha), Admiral, Amur, Lokomotiv, Neftekhimik, and Traktor didn't have a positive result in this aspect.

The unpredictability of the tournament has also grown. The most significant evidence is the decrease in the number, in both percentage and absolute figures, of the games ending in regulation. Last year, three periods were enough to set a winner in almost 80% of the cases. This year, the percentage fell to 75%. In this year's regular season, fans saw 184 OT periods, adding to them 84 SO.

Moreover, this year's regular-season also set records for the use of young players in the latest five years. In the last three seasons, 7% of the players were eligible for the WJC, while this year, the figure rose to 9.45%. The youngest teams of the season were Severstal (average age of 25.17), Lokomotiv (26.11), and CSKA (26.79) - the Red Army has also won the Continental Cup as the team with the most points in the regular season. CSKA repeated last year's triumph when they also had one of the top-three youngest rosters (26.28). It's the third time straight that CSKA falls in the top-three and the fourth for Lokomotiv. Regarding the Railwaymen, yesterday, they established a record for the youngest roster ever assembled for a regular-season game with an average of 21 years and 184 days. If that's not enough, all the players were a product of the local school, once again an unprecedented event.

Another thing that it's worth mentioning is that every fifth KHL player had its debut in the current season. Once again, it's the highest figure in the latest four seasons.

The current season has also silenced some of the widespread outcries about a decrease in the average goals scored. This is a modern-day trend observable in many different countries, and sometimes even the most absurd suggestions are brought up to solve this problem, from increasing the goals' area to reduce the number of defensemen on the ice. However, in the KHL, this doesn't seem to be a problem: the average number of goals scored has not grown, but it has also not decreased. In the current season, fans saw an average of 4.93 goals a game, 0.03 fewer than last year. A change of three hundredths can't even be called a transition in trends.