As the season heads to an end, there aren’t many teams in coast mode. It seems almost every team has a good reason for playing their hearts out right to the finish line.
In the Northern Conference, Amsterdam and Gothenburg were in a real battle for the last playoff spot until Jack Eichel’s hat trick in Stockholm’s 6-0 win Saturday leaves Gothenburg hoping for nothing short a miracle finish. They are 5 points back of the Ajax, who have one game in hand.
The sly Copenhagen Tridents, with the memory of two Cup triumphs fresh in their minds, have been lurking in the weeds within striking distance of league-leading Oslo for a couple months now. The worst the Danes could do is 3rd in the conference and a playoffs against London. But they could slide up to take the division, the conference and the President’s Trophy as the league’s number 1 team. For that to happen, the Outlaws would probably have to choke in at least one of their three games against the league’s bottom-dwelling Edinburgh and Hanover.
Helsinki has the Kharlamov Division title and 2nd seed in the conference sewn up so the Jokerit could rest critical players, but they also have their eye on the top spot.
In the Southern Conference, Bratislava is hanging on by a thread to the last playoff spot. They seemed to be sitting pretty until Ryan O’Reilly – their top scorer and best skater – went down with an injury and missed 40 days of action. The Eagles went into a nose dive when that happened. O’Reilly returned but 17 days later, he broke his wrist and is done for the season. Munich, Zurich, Milan and Prague all have at least 2 games in hand over Bratislava and all four could pass the Eagles in the standings. Just one doing so will end Bratislava’s season.
In the middle of the Southern Conference pack, Bern, Madrid, Geneva and Athens are all jockeying for the best seed position they can get. We might not know where each ends up until the final day of the regular season.
At at the top of the conference, two-time defending champion Berlin and Paris have been locked in a struggle that’s been going on for months. The Smurfs have a slight advantage (a point lead and a game in hand) but the Rouge Eiffels and leader Claude Giroux aren’t going away anytime soon. Giroux has 98 points through 78 games, and that’s almost 30 more points than anyone else on the team has scored. He is fourth in the league in scoring this season and second all-time behind John Tavares. Both men are tied for the most assists (836) in EURO history.
