has also proved that Soviet hockey was at a comparable level to the NHL. This led to the Super Series which from 1975 to 1991 featured an annual tour of North America by a Soviet hockey club. The first Super Series featured CSKA Moscow against the Montreal Canadiens on New Year’s Eve 1975, in what was described in the press as a de facto world championship. The game ended as a 3-3 draw but was hailed as one of the greatest games ever played. The following week CSKA played and lost to the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers in a game infamous for its roughness. Subsequent Super Series produced more close results, but generally favoured the Soviet sides. However, following the fall of communism, many elite players from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries went to the NHL for higher pay. The NHL became de facto the world’s most elite league as the quality of play in European leagues suffered. European leagues have, however, benefited from the frequent labor disputes in the NHL (it has locked out its players three times in an eighteen-year span), picking up players who are barred from NHL play due to lockouts. Between 2000 and 2003, several NHL teams travelled outside North America to play exhibition games against some Swedish and one Finnish ice hockey teams. This series was known as the NHL Challenge. In 2008, the former Russian Super League was refounded as the Kontinental Hockey League, expanded into Belarus, Latvia, and Kazakhstan, and encouraged its clubs to aggressively seek talented players (sometimes at the expense of the NHL), prompting the media to speculate about eventual KHL challenge to the NHL dominance of international hockey. Also in 2008, the new Champions Hockey League was created to provide an elite tournament for the best teams in Europe. The winner of the Champions Hockey League will face an NHL challenger each year in the Victoria Cup providing a regular contest between NHL and European teams since the end of the Super Series in 1991. The Champions League was suspended for the 2009-10 season due to withdrawal of sponsors such as Gazprom. In 2009, KHL and Gazprom executive Alexander Medvedev proposed merging the KHL into a new pan-European league called United Hockey Europe. Since 2007, the NHL has operated the NHL Premiere series, which brings a limited number of NHL teams (usually four) to