Following Ilves Tampere’s 2-1 loss on Sunday, it’s now time to take a break from a rigorous Liiga schedule and return to the Champions Hockey League. The team will now travel to France to take on the Rouen Dragons on Wednesday. Counting both competitions, it will be Ilves’ 15th game in 24 days.
“The beginning of the season has been extremely hectic,” 33-year-old forward Joonas Nättinen told Finnish hockey website Jatkoaika.
“The number of games has been absolutely ridiculous,” he continued. “For its part, the CHL makes an impact, but it is still difficult to understand this pace,” he said, noting stretches of three Liiga games in four days and four games in six days up until Sunday.
In the past, Nättinen was used to a busy schedule durin two seasons in the AHL – and one game with the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens in 2013-14 – and three seasons in the KHL. The last two seasons with the SHL’s HV71, however, he played in only 57 games combined.
“The last two seasons in Sweden went poorly due to injuries and because of them I played very little,” he said.
However, Nättinen doesn’t think cutting the CHL games is the solution. He’d rather say good-bye to meaningless pre-season games.
“I'd rather play the CHL like this from the beginning of the season than ‘practise’ games,” he said. “We get good trips with the boys and, of course, hard games.”
The CHL games have indeed been hard for Ilves so far. While the Tampere-based team has won eight of 10 Liiga games so far, the team has not won a CHL game in regulation time yet – in four games, Ilves has two regulation losses, an overtime loss, and an overtime win against Polish champion Unia Oświęcim. Ilves sits atop the standings in the 16-team Liiga but is strangely 21st out of 24 CHL teams with only two games to go, and is in danger of advancing to the playoffs.
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