The league will hold a press conference late on Thursday evening, where it will tell about the decisions of the general meeting.
The domestic hockey league is facing changes. A kind of period of stagnation for the crown jewel of Finnish ice hockey may end on Thursday, when the general meeting of 15 league clubs will be held in Helsinki.
The general meeting of SM-liiga Oy is scheduled to deal with the main lines of the league’s future series model. The league will organize a press conference late on Thursday evening, where it will tell about the decisions of the meeting.
Many who follow ice hockey are waiting with water on their tongues for the closed League to open after a decade’s break.
Ice hockey romantics have had wet dreams about the return of the main league qualifiers since 2013. At the end of the 2013-14 season, the qualifiers were supposed to be played between the league and the Mestis team, but the news bomb that hit at the beginning of the season about the shelving of the qualifiers turned the arrangement upside down.
Liiga boutique did get new blood in the 2010s, when Sport, KooKoo and Jukurit were promoted to the main series of cabinet decisions.
Sport’s league commission had an embarrassing aftertaste. In its rising season of 2013-14, the athletic path ended already in the quarterfinals of Mestis. After all, KooKoo and Jukurit beat Mestis on the threshold of their rising seasons, which means that their promotion to the League was more justified than Sport in terms of sports. Of course, Sport had last won Mestis in 2012.
Jokerit breaks Mestis records
The league has been forced to react to the pressure to change the league system by Kiekko-Espo and Joker’s spectacular march in Mestis.
Even last spring, the League stated that it would not accept new license applications for the 2024-25 season. Recently, Liiga announced that new applications can be submitted by the end of October.
Kiekko-Espoo plans to approach Liiga with a license application for next season. The Jokerit, who have returned from their KHL trip to the domestic rinks after a break of almost a decade, will be looking for a league place later.
Kiekko-Espoo and especially the Jokers have stolen attention from the League in Mesti. The audience average for the Jokers’ seven matches is 4,300 spectators. With this reading, by Wednesday, it would reach seventh among 15 teams in the comparison of average viewership values in the League.
It should be remembered that Jokerit has played two of the Mestis matches in Kerava’s small hall, which can only hold 1,240 spectators. If the Keravan matches are excluded from the calculations, Jokeri’s audience average in the remaining five Mestis matches rises to more than 5,500 spectators.
Last Friday, the Helsinki ice hall Jokerit was full, when 8,200 spectators watched their home game against Kiekko-Vantaa. It is Mesti’s audience record.
Kiosk closed 2000
The SM league was closed for the first time in the spring of 2000. At that time, the league expanded from 12 to 13 teams, when the Pelicans, who lost to the division club Kärpi in the qualifiers, were also qualified for the main league for the 2000-01 season. KalPa, who won the Mesti championships in 2004 and 2005, returned to the main league by cabinet decision in 2005.
The closed series already showed its face at the beginning of the millennium, when clearance sales became the talk of the town in several seasons. There was no fear of relegation, so the economy could be fixed in the middle of the season.
The qualifiers were restored for five seasons in 2008 and the all-time thriller series was already played at the end of the 2008-09 season, when Ässät, who was defending the league position, withstood the pressure of Mesti’s champion Sport with a 4-3 win.
After that, the league clubs Ilves played in the qualifiers three times, Pelicans once and Sport twice from Mestis clubs, and Jokipojat and Jukurit each once. The league clubs kept their places in the qualifiers without major difficulties.