Off-season changes & summary
The playing format for the 2018/19 Champions Hockey League Season remained unchanged from the previous year.
Wildcards were awarded to the same leagues as in previous seasons, to the national champions of Norway, Slovakia, Belarus, France, Great Britain, Denmark and Poland. In addition to Extraliga champions Neman Grodno, Belarus was also represented by Continental Cup winners Yunost Minsk.
Once again, 125 games were played over the CHL season, starting on 30 August concluding on 5 February with the one-game Final in Gothenburg. There, the Frölunda Gothenburg regained their European title, capturing their third title in four seasons by beating surprise finalists Red Bull Munich 3-1 before 12,000 fans.
Playing format
The playing format remained unchanged from 2017/18. Teams played the other three in their group at home and away, with the top two from each group going directly to the Round of 16. At this stage, a random Draw was held to determine the next matchups, with group winners being seeded and drawn against runners up.
The Playoff Stage (Round of 16, Quarter-Finals and Semi-Finals) were played in two-game, home-and-away knock-out series, where the winner on goals aggregate advanced. The Final was one game, played at the venue of the team with the best-accumulated Group Stage and Playoff record.
Group stage review | click here for Group Stage Standings 2018/19
The Group Stage provided a few surprises. While Swedish teams Frölunda, Malmö Redhawks and Skellefteå AIK all won their groups, Djurgården Stockholm and the Växjö Lakers both failed to advance – the latter a year after hosting the Final. Djurgården’s exclusion came because of Storhamar Hamar. Three years removed from a surprising run to the Round of 16, the Norwegian champs needed a pair of regulation-time wins over Oceláři Třinec in their last two games and did it. As for Växjö, their loss was Red Bull Salzburg’s gain, with the perennial Austrian powerhouse topping Group C.
We saw the first ever teams from Italy and France advance from their groups. HC Bolzano – second-time CHL qualifier as champions of the Austrian-based EBEL – finished second in Group C, thanks to the goaltending of Leyland Irving. However, they did lose their away game to GKS Tychy, which was the first win by a Polish team in the CHL. In Group F, the Rouen Dragons lost their first three games, then overcame huge odds by beating Mountfield HK once and the Nuremberg Ice Tigers twice to finish second.
The most dramatic qualifier from the Group Stage might have been HC Lugano, who went into their last two Group H games needing all six points against defending champions JYP Jyväskylä and got exactly that, thanks to back-to-back shutouts by Elvis Merzlikins. In that same group, HC Pilsen won all six games in regulation time – the only team to do so.
Altogether, we saw more countries than ever before (seven) represented among the last 16 teams standing at the end of the Group Stage.
Playoff Review | click here for Playoff tree 2018/19
In the Playoff Stage, we continued to see unprecedented success from some countries. While Storhamar, Rouen and Bolzano bowed out in the Round of 16, we saw teams from Germany and Austria advance to the Quarter-Finals and then Semi-Finals for the first time. Red Bull Munich scored dramatic victories over both EV Zug and Malmö, thanks to an overtime-winning hat-trick goal by Trevor Parkes. In the Semis, they met their Red Bull cousins from Salzburg, who along the way dispatched of Rouen and Kärpät Oulu, the last Finnish team standing. After a scoreless draw in Munich – a double shutout between Danny aus den Birken and Stephen Michalek – Munich won 3-1 in Salzburg to advance to the Final.
On the other side of the bracket, Pilsen continued their winning ways with a blowout of Bolzano and a dramatic come-from-behind shootout win over Skellefteå to reach the Semi-Finals, where they ran into a brick wall. The most successful team in CHL history, Frölunda edged Lugano and then won big over Czech teams Kometa Brno and Pilsen to reach the Final for the fourth time in five years.
In a year of upstarts, it was the experience of Frölunda that prevailed, led by captain Joel Lundqvist. On their home ice – a sold-out Scandinavium in Gothenburg – they built up a 3-0 after two periods. Munich, however, refused to go quietly and performed well in the final 20 minutes, getting a goal from Jasin Ehliz to make the final score a respectable 3-1. But the Indians were the champions for the third time – three crowns for the Swedish club – and Ryan Lasch won his second CHL scoring title with 22 points (5 + 17). After five seasons, Lasch is the competition’s all-time scoring leader with 69 points (23 + 46) in 47 games.