Kometa Brno is once again the champion of the Czech Extraliga, defeating Dynamo Pardubice 3-0 in the seventh and decisive game of the finals on Tuesday night in Pardubice. It was the second series in a row that the team won a seventh game on the road.

Kometa finished fourth in the regular season, then defeated Energie Karlovy Vary in six games in the quarterfinals and first-place Sparta Prague in seven in the semis.

The final series against third-place Pardubice was a back-and-forth affair – the teams split the first two in Pardubice and the second two in Brno, and then the visiting team won each of the last three games. In Game 7, former NHLer Peter Mueller opened the scoring in the first period, and that goal held up until the third period, when Jakub Flek and then Andrej Kollár into an empty net rounded out the scoring. Pardubice outshot Kometa 21-20, with Kometa goalie Michal Postava stopping everything for his third shutout of the playoffs.

“I can’t say a single bad word,” the 23-year-old goalie said about his team afterwards. “The guys were incredible – they blocked at least 20 shots that didn’t get through to me. (The shutout) is a team achievement. I believe that we had a better team than the other teams. We knew that we weren’t at the level of Sparta or Pardubice in terms of talent, but we still went for the fact that anything is possible in the playoffs. Writing history is even better when you're not the favorite.”

In addition to Postava, captain and leading scorer Flek, and Mueller, Kometa’s roster also included some siblings of well-known players: Kristián Pospišil, Hynek Zohorna and Adam Zbořil. In an interesting twist, ex-NHLer Jakub Zbořil was expected to sign with Kometa last October but instead signed with Pardubice, and found himself on the losing side of this series.

Surprise: Jakub Zbořil Signs In Czechia But Not With Kometa Brno Several days ago, Czech Extraliga club <a href="https://thehockeynews.com/international/latest-news/former-bruins-first-rounder-headed-home-to-czechia">Kometa Brno announced that negotiations were underway with hometown player and former NHL defenseman Jakub Zbořil</a>. On Sunday, however, rival Extraliga club <a href="https://www.hcdynamo.cz/clanek.asp?id=Po-deseti-letech-v-zamori-navrat-do-Ceska-Jakub-Zboril-si-vybral-Dynamo-13966">Dynamo Pardubice announced</a> that it had signed the 27-year-old to a five-year deal.

The loss is a bitter pill for Pardubice, who for the second year in a row lost Game 7 of the finals on home ice. Last year, after finishing first in the regular season, Pardubice was defeated 3-2 in overtime by Oceláři Třinec in the seventh game.

“It was tough, but we were really close,” said Pardubice captain Roman Červenka, who still has not committed to joining the Czech team at this year’s World Championship. “It’s really sad now. If you get eliminated in the first round, or even in the finals in five games, but that seventh game ... It’s about learning from it, from everything, from the whole season. We had a good playoff, unfortunately something was missing. There’s no point in looking for excuses. We weren’t able to score today and that’s a shame. The season is only judged by how it ends, and we were so close to it ending well.”

This was the 14th national championship for the Brno club, which topped the Czechoslovak league 11 times in 12 seasons between 1954-55 and 1965-66, and then won back-to-back Czech titles in 2016-17 and 2017-18.

Prior to this season, Oceláři Třinec had won five straight Extraliga titles before being eliminated by Sparta in the quarterfinals. The Třinec and Brno teams have now combined to win the last eight Extraliga titles, with no champion crowned in 2020 due to the pandemic. The last time another team won was in 2015-16, when Bílí Tygři Liberec defeated Sparta Prague in the finals.

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