Statement released by the Chairman of the SKA Board of Directors Alexander Medvedev

— Having worked with the Kontinental Hockey League, SKA Saint Petersburg, FC Zenit Saint Petersburg and BC Zenit Saint Petersburg, I did not consider it possible nor appropriate to comment on the officiating or blame the referees for negative results. However, following the two missed fouls by UNICS Kazan in the VTB United League and the penalty issued to Nikita Serebryakov for SKA, my patience has ended.

In terms of the refereeing, yesterday we saw something which has been occurring during the entire season. The playoffs, including the fifth match of the quarter-final series with Avtomobilist, only confirmed this. How was it possible to penalise Serebryakov after he had played the puck?

And the incident at the end of the third period when Avtomobilist trapped the puck and consequently delayed the match? More than 20 thousand people inside the arena saw what was happening. This is simply nonsense.

At the start of the series against Yekaterinburg, the entire ice hockey community was surprised at the penalty given to Arseniy Gritsyuk, but this was only one of many episodes which happened in this series.

The club has been faced with similar questionable refereeing decisions throughout the season. In the playoffs, SKA received the highest amount of minor penalties by a significant margin.

SKA unleash more shots than anyone else, attack more than any other team, but at the same time our team received the highest amount of penalty minutes. It's been this way from the very first playoff game. There is no other way to explain this other than bias.

The injuries which our players suffered were picked up as a consequence of the opponents' dirty challenges which were missed by the officials. Instead of losing players to injury, we need to protect them and to ensure that our ice hockey becomes a lot cleaner.

I think that all referees need to look in the mirror and change their approach. Thanks to just a couple of their mistakes, people's months of hard work is being thrown away. Wrongly conceded goals, mistakes for penalties - this has been going on for a long time, but no one is taking responsibility.