MUNICH – It could have been so easy.
Berlin won the championship of the DEL in April after a well-deserved best-of-five final win against Wolfsburg.
Afterwards the national team did a fantastic job at the IIHF World Cup beating Russia for the first time since 1994 and getting to the quarter final. But during the World Cup there were many problems inside German ice hockey.
First, there was the problem with the German head coach, Uwe Krupp. Cologne was looking for a new coach and found it – in the national team manager Uwe Krupp. That is not a big thing normally. But it’s forbidden for the German national manager to coach a team in the league. So it took a few weeks until the contract was fixed. But after this, Krupp was not thinking as a national manager anymore, but for the manager for the Cologne Sharks.
So it’s no wonder that in the new German team there are four players from next year’s Sharks team. For example, Kevin Lavallee comes from the EHC Munich. This was a really mysterious story. Lavallee had verbal promise to the Munich manager Winkler for a contract for next season which he wanted to sign after the World Cup games. But surprisingly, he signed a contract at Cologne. Now he is on the World Cup roster and nobody can deny that there is a little bit of distaste over the action.
After the World Cup, the DEL (first German league) and the DEB (German ice hockey federation) couldn’t agree on a leader. Weeks after the World Cup and after a denial from Ralph Krueger, both parties agreed to the Swiss Jakob Kölliker.
But this was just the beginning of the yearly summer theater.
The root of all evil was the ending of the “Cooperation contract” which regulates the German ice hockey league system. The DEL is a franchise league like the NHL and the second and third league are organized under the control of the ESBG and the lower leagues are organized by their regional hockey federations.
In the European and German sport philosophy, there are normally no understandings for franchising leagues, there is always a possibility to be relegated up and down. But the DEL with its franchise system, has the view that ice hockey in Germany can only survive in a league which is organized as a franchise league with a fixed number of teams and clear rules of the qualification to be part of it. For this, teams have to achieve a 9000-point schedule (For example, every seat gives 2 points, every video wall 1000 and so on).
And now, the DEB informed the teams of the DEL that, if they don’t agree to the new proposal, the DEL-teams will not be members of the IIHF. With this, IIHF-members could fine their teams when they have games against DEL-teams.
And the main problem is that both parties, DEL and DEB, are apparently not talking to each other but just with the newspapers.
And with this policy, all the good news from the World Cup and the two Germans in the Stanley Cup Final stepping are pushed into the shadows of this discussion. Robin.hilger@prohockeynews.com
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