WATCH: KHL player goes on stunning one-man rampage, tries to fight entire team
If you hadn’t heard, the KHL preseason is serious business. Or it’s a post-apocalyptic version of hockey. You’ll have to decide for yourself.
A preseason game between the KHL’s Kazakhstan-based club Barys Astana and Kunlun Red Star, the league’s first China-based team playing in their inaugural season, was suspended after only three minutes because of a brawl between the two teams Monday. It wasn’t so much of a brawl as it was Barys defenseman Damir Ryspayev going on a one-man mission to maim as many Kunlun players as he could. He quite literally tried to fight just about the entire team.
This is the kind of thing you’re more likely to see in a movie than an actual hockey game, but this is very real and kind of disturbing, too. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Here’s the stunning video (sans audio) via Jeff Veillette of The Nation Network:
It all started off when Ryspayev sucker-punches a Kunlun player, which appeared to be Slovakian forward Tomas Marcinko, in the face off of a faceoff. He then tried to pick the injured player up by the jersey before the officials intervened. But Ryspayev wasn’t done.
When another scrap broke out, the linesmen left Ryspayev unattended before depositing him in the penalty box. That turned out to be a critical mistake. The Barys forward skated over and grabbed another Kunlun player, who was merely standing and watching, and just started wailing on the guy before sending the fallen player sliding down the ice.
Then there was another Red Star player simply tied up with one of the Barys players, with nothing much going on between the two. Ryspayev grabbed him, too, and repeated his assault, dropping the player with a couple of hard punches. And he still wasn’t done.
The Kazakhstani blueliner kept going, grabbing No. 84 (preseason rosters with numbers are hard to come by) for a second time and dropping him with a hard right despite the player trying to get away from the punches while holding a glove to his face.
Surely that was the end of it.
Or not.
Ryspayev went to the Kunlun bench and grabbed the first player he could find. A coach or trainer jumped in to try and fend off the Barys forward who probably would have fought every player on the bench.
Finally… finally, the linesmen got in there and corralled Ryspayev, whose path of destruction forced Kunlun coach Vladimir Jurzinov to pull his team off the ice, according to Championat.com, forcing Kunlun to forfeit the game, which was part of a preseason tournament. The teams were vying for the President of Kazakhstan’s Cup, per the KHL.
Here’s an alternate angle of the carnage:
These two teams were involved in a series of fights in their previous preseason game on Saturday, too, which undoubtedly fueled the continued violence Monday. One of the Barys players ended up leaving the game on a stretcher after an awkward hit into the boards in that previous game, which sparked the late-game fisticuffs. According to the KHL’s website, there were 196 minutes in penalties, including six penalties dished out for a third-period line brawl between the two teams (video here) Saturday.
It appears that Ryspayev is hockey’s equivalent of a hit man. He appeared in only 16 KHL games for Barys last season. Despite his limited involvement at the top level, he racked up 111 penalty minutes. Over 23 career KHL games he has posted 194 penalty minutes and zero points, per eliteprospects.com.
The KHL has already announced an indefinite suspension for the Barys defenseman, with further punishment to be doled out by the league’s disciplinary committee at a later date.
[H/T Jeff Veillette]