The legendary Dynamo, like Pan American World Airways, is gone

By BY JEFF Z. KLEIN AND STU HACKEL, NYT, Apr. 24, 2010:

One of the greatest clubs in the history of hockey, Dynamo Moscow, announced last week that it was ceasing operations on April 30.

Former Dynamo stars like Alex Ovechkin expressed their surprise and sadness at the news. “I can’t believe there’s going to be no more Dynamo,” Ovechkin said.

Dynamo was the first Soviet hockey team, when the club’s bandy players decided to try the six-man, small-rink Canadian version of the game in December 1946. Dynamo won the first domestic championship and seven more, the last in 2005, and produced a galaxy of legendary players, including Vitaly Davydov, Aleksandr Maltsev, Valery Vasiliev, Zinetula Bilyaletdinov and, more recently, Darius Kasparaitis, Alexei Kovalev and Ovechkin.

Although in the 1960s and ’70s it took a back seat to perennial champion CSKA Moscow, Dynamo generally supplied roughly a third of the players to the powerful Soviet national teams of the era.

This season Dynamo finished third in the Russian league’s 12-team Western Conference, but was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, and soon afterward the team’s sponsors withdrew support. Its players are in a kind of limbo, according to the captain Alexei Zhitnik., and the contractual status of such players as the former Red Wing Jiri Hudler is unclear.

There were reports that Dinamo might merge with suburban-based HK MVD Balashikha, which is in the Gagarin Cup final vs. Ak Bars Kazan. But those discussions are apparently on hold until after April 30.

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