Puckarinen

Fall break! Wooohooo!! Well, the national team breaks that bring the European leagues to a halt a couple of times a season aren’t exactly the time to hop on a plane to Florida. They’re there to give the top nations a chance to play their friendly games in markets where the national teams sell, and sell well.

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Quiet here?

This is why:

Sean Simpson channels Herb Brooks?
Sulander gets belated respect
"No love for Hallenstadion"
"We underestimated them"
"ZSC on top of the world"
For Sulander, it's now or never

STOCKHOLM – Nordic Trophy, the Finnish-Swedish pre-season league, announced in late April that it had added two teams from each country to the league. Malmö and Lukko Rauma made the Nordic Trophy a 12-team league that many saw as a stepping stone towards a Nordic hockey league, and rumours of even bigger plans have been floating around.

For this season, the league also renamed its two groups to “Northwest Division” and “Central Division”, in line with the rumoured plans to start a European league with divisions just like that.

Today, a mere month and a half later, the six Finnish league clubs sent a joint statement, signed by all six CEOs, in which they informed the press about their decision to “take a year off” and to play a Finnish pre-season league with a final tournament played in Tampere at the end of August. The winner will get €30,000, second-placed team 20,000 and the third 10,000.

Also, the teams say that they will “focus on developing the Finnish SM-liiga”.

The Finnish SM-liiga held its management team meeting today, and none of the six CEOs was available for comments. Kärpät CEO Juha Junno told IIHF.com simply that, “it’s no big deal, we’ll do this instead.”

The SM-liiga clubs’ decision came as a surprise to the Swedes. None of the people – clubs’ GMs, tournament director – IIHF.com spoke with had heard of the Finns’ decision to leave the league.

“That information hasn’t reached us yet,” said a stunned tournament director Bo Lennartsson.

“It’s not something we’ve discussed together. On the contrary, we’ve been planning everything as usual,” he said.

The Nordic Trophy was scheduled to kick off on August 6 with two games: Tappara - Frölunda, and Kärpät - Malmö. Instead, Tappara will take on Jokerit while Kärpät will play against HIFK.

Frölunda and Malmö will have to make new plans.

No matter where you look these days, the hockey scene seems to be in something of a chaos.



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This is how this week's Eye On Europe (the parade edition) begins:

Just as bizarre as having local boy Matti Nykanen, a former ski jumping World and Olympic champion-turned pop singer/general celebrity perform at the championship parade in downtown Jyvaskyla may seem, just as logical was the fact JYP won the Finnish SM-liiga championship this season.

Read the rest here.

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Aaaaaand here's this week's Eye on Europe. Enjoy.

Here's this week's Eye on Europe, a roundup of European action.

The quarterfinal playoff series between EV Zug and SC Bern offers so many possible puns and metaphors that it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s one: The way the series went, it looked like the bears were hit by a train. You know, “zug” is German for “train” and the logo of Bern is a bear.

Oh well, maybe it wasn’t the greatest of metaphors.

Read the rest of this week's Eye on Europe on THN.com.

And here's this week's Eye On Europe from The Hockey News. Enjoy.

Here's this week's "I on Europe" from The Hockey News.

Here, that is.

Here's my latest from THN. Enjoy.

Here's what happened at the LG Hockey Games in Stockholm this past weekend:

• Sweden took a sweet victory in the LG Hockey Games, the third tournament in this season’s Euro Hockey Tour. The hosts grabbed three wins – Russia (4-3), Czech Republic (6-4), and Finland (4-0) – and gave head coach Bengt-Åke Gustafsson something to wave in front of those critical of the team’s performances this season.


• The LG Hockey Games All-Stars, as voted by the media:
  Goaltender: Johan Holmqvist (Sweden)
  Defencemen: Janne Niinimaa (Finland), Kenny Jönsson (Sweden)
  Forwards: Niko Kapanen (Finland), Mattias Weinhandl (Sweden), Maxim Rybin (Russia)


• Sweden iced a very experienced defence corps in the tournament. In the team’s first game against Russia, Dick Tärnström, 34, was the youngest defenceman on Team Sweden, while Marcus Ragnarsson, 37, was the oldest. Tärnström injured his knee in the second game, opening the door for Victor Hedman, 18.


• Even though Russia didn’t win the tournament, it collected enough points to already secure the total victory of the Euro Hockey Tour 2008-09, when one tournament still remains to be played.


• Finland scored nine goals in the first five periods of the tournament, and none in the last four. The team had a 4-1 lead after two periods against Russia, but lost the game 5-4 in a penalty shoot-out, and was shut out by the Swedes in the last game of the tournament.

Here's something new from The Hockey News.

Few players exemplify hockey’s progress as a true international sport as well as Sebastién Bordeleau and Ryan Gardner, two second-generation Canadian-born pro players who now play under different flags. Bordeleau plays for France and Gardner - who got his Swiss citizenship last year – plays for Switzerland.

Bordeleau, the son of Paulin Bordeleau - also a French national team player - will be wearing the tricolors this weekend when France takes on Kazakhstan, Denmark, and Norway in the Olympic qualification tournament in Oslo, Norway.

Read the rest here. My "Eye on Europe" will be featured on THN.com every Friday.

And the Champions Hockey League is turning the final corner, with ZSC Lions Zurich and Metallurg Magnitogorsk advancing to the two-part final, played on January 21 and 28.

Here's how Metallurg did it.

So, it's 2009. I'm back from my break.

Of course, the hockey world didn't stop to wait for me to recharge my batteries. There was the Spengler Cup (Dynamo Moscow won), the Izvestija tournament (Russia won), the Winter Classic (Detroit won), and then there was Modo who kept losing in the Swedish Elitserien.

They have only won two of their last 17 or so, and are now dead last in the standings - tied with Djurgården and Södertälje.

That made the fans' blood boil so much that some of them trashed the club's two-year-old Swedbank Arena that Peter Forsberg built, breaking windows and painting demands of the resignation of the club's board of directors on the walls.

Modo replied with a letter to the fans on its website.

Unfortunately, the people responsible for the vandalism may not know how to read.

A change of scenery may be exactly what it takes to kick start a career.

For all the champions, beautiful goals, NHL dreams, and shooting stars, there is also that one disappointment. A team that underachieves all season, a player who signed a fat contract isn’t producing, or the prospect that just doesn’t seem to be able to take his game to the next level, after all.

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The new European club competition, Champions Hockey League, got the clubs' and fans' attention fast when the IIHF announced that the league would have the biggest prize purse ever in European hockey, ten million euro in total.

The money has been front and center in a lot of stories that have been written about the CHL, as a motive for the players to play hard, even when the team's chances to advance to the semifinal have gone.

So, it was nice to see that a team can decide to tank a game even when there's 50 000 euros on the line. Money isn't everything.

Here's something I wrote for the IIHF.com.

HELSINKI – Kalervo Kummola, the chairman of the Finnish Ice Hockey Federation, has been the chairman of the federation since 1997, but his career in Finnish top hockey can be traced back to the mid-1970s when he served as the CEO of the newly-founded SM-liiga - and doubling as the CEO of the federation for a a couple of years in the early 1980s.

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