TYUMEN, Russia -- Imagine the consternation if the Toronto Maple Leafs didn't know until three days beforehand whether they would have enough money to play road games in Edmonton and Calgary.
Imagine if it was doubtful the Leafs would be able to afford airplane tickets to make a one-game trip to Vancouver a few weeks later.
That's the situation that Moscow Dynamo and most of the 22 other teams in Russia's premier division have been in since the collapse in late August of the already pathetic Russian currency, the ruble.
Dynamo's 5,000-kilometre round trip -- by airplane and train to Tyumen, in the Urals, and to Omsk in Siberia -- only became a certainty 72 hours before the games were to be played last week.
A 16,000-kilometre odyssey nine time zones to the east to play one game against Amur Khabarovsk, which is much further away from Moscow than Hawaii is from Toronto, remains up in the air.
"We're still searching for the rubles to buy the plane tickets to play in Khabarovsk," said Vitali Davidov, Dynamo's manager and a former star with some of the greatest Soviet teams.
"The money situation is bad. Yet we don't give up. We stay on track."
Russia's economy seems locked in a death spiral. Like every other business in the country, hockey is being sucked into the abyss. The sport already had been reeling from the loss of its top 100 players to the NHL and leagues across western Europe, but the plunging ruble has made matters far worse.
Cruelly exposed to what everyone in Russia simply calls "the crisis" are the legendary Moscow clubs -- Red Army, Spartak, Wings of the Soviet, and Dynamo. During the Soviet era, these clubs received the biggest state subsidies and had preferential access to almost all of the best players.
This situation was reversed after Mikhail Gorbachev launched perestroika, or economic reforms, in the late 1980s. The Moscow clubs, which became dependent on corporate sponsors, fought for their lives, while factories and regional governors who used sport as a vote-buying weapon, turned teams on the periphery -- such as Metagallursk Nizhnykamsk and Salavat Uliev -- into modest successes. But even that is now at risk.
Many factories and regional governments recently have gone bankrupt. Not one of the premier division's far-flung teams is thought to be solvent.
The cause of these extreme difficulties is evident everywhere.
Hundreds of thousands of Russia's best-paid workers have lost their jobs since the country began defaulting on billions of dollars in western loans this summer. Millions of factory workers, miners and teachers still go to work but haven't received a paycheque for months.
Players such as Nikolai Antropov, who was the Leafs' first-round draft pick four months ago, recently signed a ruble-based contract with Dynamo, which assumed an exchange rate of six rubles to the U.S. dollar. But it now takes 16 rubles to buy a Yankee greenback.
COUNTRY BLUES
"Everything depends on the fate of our country," said Calgary Flames draft choice Dimitri Kokorev, who had expected to be paid about $1,300 Cdn per month this season, but is now getting $800 less.
"The team has promised to make up the difference to all of us by the end of the season. But nobody thinks they will be able to do so."
To save money, Dynamo's players were stacked four-to-a-compartment in narrow bunkbeds for the bone-jarring, 12- hour, "hard class" overnight journey from Tyumen to Omsk. Unlike in the NHL, where players seldom have to carry their own gear, Dynamo players lug not only their own duffle bags on and off airplanes, trains and buses, but the rest of the team's weighty paraphernalia as well.
"That's our Russian life," said 19-year-old Maxim Afinogenov, Dynamo's flashiest player and a Buffalo Sabres prospect, as he waited with his teammates in the mud and snow at Tyumen airport's shabby outdoor-baggage hall, shortly after flying in from Moscow.
Twenty-year-old Ivan Maslov and his teammates on Rubin Tyumen's second professional team have not been paid this season, which is only one-quarter completed.
"Everyone knows the country is broke, and hockey is no exception. Our city has not escaped this reality, either."
Games against Dynamo usually sellout in Tyumen. But only 2,000 of the 3,200 tickets were bought for last Sunday's matinee, which Dynamo won 5-2, even though adult tickets for these games -- about the same quality as those played in the American Hockey League -- cost only 20 rubles ($2), and tickets for children were half that.
Yet even those prices were too steep for most fans.
"In view of the crisis, the tickets are much too expensive," said 15-year-old Julia Nikitenko, who had come to the match with her girlfriend, Zoa Chiksheva. "We were only able to come because our parents found enough rubles for us."
BIGGER CONCERN
Quite aside from the severe consequences of Russia's financial meltdown is a more pressing reality.
"The league has far too many teams and is too geographically dispersed," Dynamo's Vitali Davidov said. "This east-west formula was a cherished dream, but too many teams and so much geography means too much travelling. The league must become smaller."
Rubin Tyumen, the team which represents this city of 670,000 people, is in a dreadful jam. It has little government support and not a single sponsor.
"There is not another hockey team in the league which is entirely dependent on the municipal government," said Yesin Abilkenov, 20, who writes for a local paper. "Over the past three years, all of our best players have left, and we're now the worst team in the league.
"Hockey only survives here at all because the sport has such deep roots -- nothing else."
Anatoli Yulyugin's job is to try to keep Rubin Tyumen going.
After genially dismissing Dynamo's financial problems as "an exaggeration" and "the usual Moscow propaganda," the hockey executive said the entire league was in jeopardy.
"As in Canada, hockey and economics are inseparable," Yulyugin said. "The most important difficulty at the moment is the exchange rate. All our hockey equipment is imported, and the American dollar has gone up 270% against the ruble in just six weeks.
"Look at our box office. We get, say, 20 rubles times 2,500 tickets times 21 home games. That's a little more than one million rubles (about $100,000 Cdn). In such a situation, it is impossible for any team to break even."
Such dark arithmetic points to the death of pro hockey in Tyumen and across Russia. But not one of the dozens of fans, players and team executives interviewed for this story would hear of it.
"Rumours that the league might not complete the season remain," Dynamo's Davidov said. "But we are resolved to play every one of our scheduled 42 league games and complete the season."
Ivan Maslov, who still dreams of one day playing for a Moscow team rather than in Tyumen, said: "Hockey must survive. There is no other option. Russians love this game."