Pro Hockey Resume

By Helsingin Sanomat

Regular season winners and runners-up blown away

Well! There’s a turnup for the book!
TPS Turku (sixth in the regular SM-Liiga season) and HPK Hämeenlinna (5th) emerged from the semi-final stage of the playoffs as the stronger teams and booked themselves a place in the finals. The best-of-seven final series will begin on Thursday (HPK vs. TPS in Hämeenlinna) and will run through until one team has taken four victories.
The title and the destination of the Canada Trophy for 2009/2010 should be decided no later than May 2nd.

In the end, a little piece of Finnish ice hockey history (never before have two teams from outside the top four made it through to the finals in this way) was created very emphatically – at least in the Turkuhalli arena.
TPS bludgeoned the SM-Liiga winners JYP of Jyväskylä in a 6-1 rout, with four goals in the second period leaving no doubt which was the better side on the night.
HPK were pushed a little harder by league runners- up KalPa from Kuopio, but hung on to win 4-3 after coming from behind to erase a 2-0 deficit from the first period.
In both cases the underdogs won the series of matches by 4 wins to 2.

It is not exactly as though complete rank outsiders have won their way to the top table: HPK were Finnish champions in 2006 and bronze medalists in 2007, and TPS have an illustrious history with eight titles won in a purple period between 1989 and 2001.
All the same, in the case of TPS in particular, it has been “tradition” rather than “results” that has been the watchword for the team for the past few years, when the dominant force in the league has been Kärpät from Oulu (four wins between 2004 and 2008 and the runner-up spot to JYP last year).
HPK will be looking to earn their second title, TPS their tenth.

Turku’s second coming has been duly noted in the city, which has the second-largest arena in Finland, with a capacity of more than 11,000.
Back in the day, the hall was regularly full, but these past lean years it has not been.
Last night, however, it was packed out again as 11,107 spectators sang their hearts out and delivered a standing ovation during the final minutes of the third period.
HPK Hämeenlinna, if they win, will be a very Finnish champion.
It is the only club in the entire SM-Liiga not to have a single foreign-born player on the roster this year.

The fate of the bronze medals will be determined quite quickly – nobody wants a long and drawn out battle for third place, after all.
JYP and KalPa will meet in Jyväskylä on Friday in a winner-takes-all encounter.

By Helsingin Sanomat – Finland

HIFK Helsinki only capital area team left in hockey playoffs

The clocks went forward an hour on Sunday to mark the beginning of summer time, even though it seems grotesquely early amidst all the snow still lying on the ground.

Summer also came uncomfortably early for fans of Helsinki Jokerit and Espoo Blues, as their involvement in the SM-Liiga hockey playoffs ended rather predictably at the first hurdle on Friday evening.

The so-called “wild card” round of the playoffs (also somewhat unkindly referred to as the “charity playoffs”), leading to the quarter-finals, proved to be too much for both the capital area teams.

Jokerit went down 4-2 to Tappara in Tampere, and Blues lost 2-1 at home to Kärpät of Oulu.
There was a certain continuity about the Blues defeat – Kärpät have knocked them out of the competition at various stages during the last five seasons.

As for Jokerit, they only scraped into the playoffs at the last moment and have not looked like world-beaters at any stage during the past campaign.

The weekend’s two winners will go forward to the quarter-finals and to tough encounters with the regular season winner JYP of Jyväskyla and runner-up KalPa from Kuopio.

The pairings for the last eight (with places in the semi-finals to be decided on a best-of-seven matches principle) are as follows:
JYP vs. Kärpät
KalPa vs. Tappara
Rauma Lukko vs. TPS Turku
HIFK Helsinki vs. HPK Hämeenlinna
HIFK are thus the only team from the capital area still in the competition.

By: Helsingin Sanomat – Finland

SM-Liiga regular season honours again go to JYP of Jyväskylä

Tuesday saw the first round of play-off matches towards the Finnish ice hockey championship final, which will decide the owners for another year of the Canada Trophy, currently held by JYP of Jyväskylä.

The first round is a kind of “wild card” preliminary stage to find two teams from four to go forward to the quarter-finals.

The four teams obliged to take an extra step are those that settled between 7th and 10th in the final standings after the regular SM-Liiga season ended last weekend.

Tappara of Tampere finished 7th and were matched against the 10th-place side Helsinki Jokerit, while 8th-placed Blues from Espoo faced Oulu Kärpät. The higher-ranked team had home advantage in the best-of-three series.

Unfortunately for Blues, home advantage seemed not to have been much use: they went down rather tamely 2-3 in Espoo and will be facing an early exit from the proceedings if the Oulu team can win again on Thursday.
It must have seemed like déjà vu all over again for Blues – Kärpät beat them in the final in 2008, in the semi-finals in 2009 and 2007, and in the quarters in 2006.

Helsinki Jokerit only scraped into the top ten and over the play-offs line in the very last round of the regular season, but they, too, look like paying only a short visit to the play-offs.

Tappara took the first game 5-3. Jokerit will host the Tampere side on Thursday, but even if they win that game, they will have to go back to Tampere for a third match on the 26th.

The next stage will be the quarter-finals proper, in which the top six teams from the SM-Liiga table are joined by the two “wild card” round winners.

At that stage, some of the pairings are already determined: Rauma Lukko (3rd in the regular season) will meet TPS Turku (6th), and HIFK Helsinki (4th) will play HPK from Hämeenlinna (5th). The regular season winners JYP from Jyväskylä and runners-up KalPa of Kuopio will play the winners of the “wild card” encounters.

At this stage neither JYP nor KalPa know their opponents, not just because the matches are still in progress, but since the arrangement is that JYP will automatically get to play the “weaker” of the two candidates, based on their standing in the regular season.

The quarter-finals will be based on a best-of-seven principle, with the higher-ranked of the teams enjoying home advantage in the first match (and thus potentially also in the deciding seventh game).

This year’s regular season saw a repeat of 2008/2009 in that JYP took top honours, although this time around it was neck-and-neck between Lukko, KalPa and JYP for a long while, and only four points separated these three teams after 58 games.

Last year JYP also went on to win the Canada Trophy for the first time in the club’s history, beating Kärpät comprehensively in the final.

At the other end of the league table, Ilves from Tampere (holders of 16 Finnish championships in their history) were doomed long before the 2009/10 season came to an end, and they will have to win a best-of-seven series against Jokipojat of Joensuu (winners of the 1st Division title) in order to hang on to their place in the top flight.

These life-or-death games begin on March 30th.