The Season 3 playoff matchups are almost set in stone, but not quite. Four games left on the schedule could affect first-round matchups.
On Friday, Gothenburg will host Moscow and Geneva will host Bern for the back end of their home-and-home series. If Bern wins, they will play Berlin in the first round; if they lose, they will face Paris. More on Gothenburg’s fate below.
On Sunday night, we should know if Helsinki will retain its No. 4 seed in the Northern Conference or if the Gothenburg Devils will overtake them. Either way, Helsinki and Gothenburg will do battle in a first-round series, but who gets the extra home game might be huge. Guess which team in the entire EURO League has the fewest regulation losses at home. It’s Gothenburg with only 6. Helsinki knows they’ll have to beat Dublin in Ireland on Sunday and they would really love it if Moscow could beat Gothenburg for them Friday, because the Devils get the last-place team on Sunday. But don’t overlook the Stockholm Eagles. They have gone 7-2 this month. That Stockholm-Gothenburg on Sunday will end the regular season and be the rubber game in a Battle of Sweden Series that league schedulers set up during the final week of the season for Scandinavian fans. On Sunday, Stockholm beat Gothenburg 4-3, but the Devils got their revenge two days later with a 6-3 victory.
There are no other moving parts in the playoff structure now that Minsk has secured the final spot in the North with their 4-1 win over Oslo. Defenseman Kris Russell led the way by scoring his eighth and ninth goals of the season in that game. Belfast, Oslo and London all had their playoff hopes dashed Wednesday.
There are also a handful of individual titles on the line between now and the end of the season on Sunday.
- With one assist against Berlin, Madrid’s Joe Pavelski can tie Athens’ David Backes for the league assist title. With three assists, he could tie the league record of 78, which Prague’s Ryan Getzlaf set last season. Several other league records have already been broken this season. We’ll try to get to those in a separate story soon.
- If Dublin’s Ryan Kesler can score 2 goals in his remaining 2 games, he will tie Belfast’s Sidney Crosby for the goal scoring lead at 53. The EURO currently has four 50-goal scorers: Crosby, 53 goals; Kesler and Paris’ Evgeny Malkin, 51; and Alexander Ovechkin of Copenhagen, 50. We had two 50-goal scorers in Season 1 (Steven Stamkos and Eric Staal) and one (Bobby Ryan of Dublin) last season. Madrid’s Rick Nash could join the 50-goal club if he scores a hat trick against Berlin’s Erik Ersberg or Jimmy Howard on Friday.
- Nash’s teammate Erik Karlsson has some incentive to feed him the puck tomorrow. With a great game and four points, he could tie Copenhagen’s Alex Goligoski as the top-scoring defenseman in the league.
- Moscow’s first-year defense star Andrei Markov needs two goals against Gothenburg on Friday to tie Athens’ Dustin Byfuglien as the best goal-scoring defenseman in the league. Byfuglien finished the season with 25 goals.
- And one minor stats title could still change. Currently, Dan Boyle of Munich and Drew Doughty of Frankfurt are done for the season and both have 121 blocked shots to their credit to share the league lead. Bern’s Brent Seabrook has one game to catch them. He has 118.
