Pro Kabaddi League 2017 Season 5 is expected to be the biggest season in the history of the championship so far with 12 teams that will be divided into a new format of two zones. Zone A is supposed to be made up of Delhi, Haryana, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Mumbai. Zone B will be made up of Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Patna, Kolkata, and Lucknow. In all, this season is expected to feature 132 games. The league stage of the season will start from July 28 and end on October 20. In the league phase each team is supposed to play 22 matches. 15 of these games will be intra-zone and the rest will be played on an inter-zonal basis.
What is new this season?
It is expected that each venue will host 11 matches and that each team will play six games at home. The playoff stage will see six games and will run from October 22 to 28. This stage will feature the best three teams from each zone, which can be interpreted as a way of rewarding consistent performance. In the intra-zone phase each team in a zone will face the other team in that zone three times. This means that at this stage they will play 15 games each. In the inter-zone phase that will last three weeks each team will face the teams from the other zone once. The penultimate week of this phase would see wild-card matches that will be decided by a mid-season draw. The playoff stage will be played in Mumbai and Chennai. This season the organizers are trying to provide something different for the viewers. They want to provide a higher level of entertainment and thrill. This is the reason why innovations like various stages in the league phase and wild-card matches are being organized this time around. Alongwith the eight established teams, four teams will be making their debuts this season. All the teams may be mentioned as below:
- Bengal Warriors
- Bengaluru Bulls
- Dabang Delhi KC
- Jaipur Pink Panthers
- Patna Pirates
- Puneri Paltan
- Telugu Titans
- U Mumba
- Gujarat Fortunegiants
- UP Yoddha
- Tamil Thalaivas
- Haryana Steelers
- Manoj Kumar
- Shrikant Tewthia
- Mahipal Narwal
- Sachin Shingade
- Somvir Shekhar
- Dharmalaj Cherlathan
- Deepak Niwas Hooda and Rajesh Mondal
- Pardeep Narwal and Monu Goyat
- Rahul Chaudhari and Nilesh Salunke
- Nitin Tomar and Rishank Devadiga
- Anup Kumar and Kashiling Adake
- Manoj Dhull
- Deepak Narwal
- Nitin Tomar
- Amit Hooda
- Pardeep Narwal
- Ajay Thakur
- Jasvir Singh
- Mohit Chhillar
- Surender Nada
- Surjeet
- Kiran Parmar
- Manjeet Chhillar
