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Bob Hartley and his team moving out of their home? |
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KHL's Avangard Omsk and their head coach Bob Hartley appear to be moving out of ''Arena Omsk'' and looking for a new home.
It has been reported that the Avangard home arena that was built in 2007 has undergoing intensive reconstructions to finish the rink in time for the KHL regular season that begins on September 1st but it doesn't look like it'll happen.
Their backup option is the ''Victor Bilanov Arena'' where the team used to play some games but that rink is also in need of major reconstruction work which should take much longer than the team or KHL would like to.
Their only option now is finding a place to play their ''home games'' somewhere outside the city of Omsk.
''Mistichi (former home of KHL's Atlant team) and Balashika (Home of another former KHL team - MVD) are our two of our options but we are exploring a few more. We are looking at arenas that are closer to Omsk and some further away. But whatever our choice is we still have to figure out if we will be allowed to play more than one game. We will have to play at least a few games wherever we decide to go and we have no idea when we would be able to return home so obviously our main priority is to find a place where we could play the whole season in the worst case scenario'' said the team president Maxim Sushinsky.
In this past season, Omsk finished 7 in their conference and stopped in the first round of Gagarin Cup playoffs losing in 7 games (3:4) against Salavat Julaev UFA. Avangard has reached the cup finals only once.
Bob Hartley signed a two-year deal with Omsk this summer following two successful stints with Latvian National team which he will continue running during the international windows.
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