TPS wins Finnish Ice Hockey Championship in style

First title since 2001 for traditional hockey giants

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There was a brief hiccup along the way, when they rather unexpectedly lost at home to HPK Hämeenlinna on Tuesday, but it only delayed matters momentarily, as TPS Turku swept to their eleventh win in the Finnish Ice Hockey Championships and took possession for a year of the coveted Canada Trophy.
      TPS's triumph came after a nearly faultless performance in the play-offs, which they entered as veritable underdogs, having managed to finish only sixth in the regular season.
      In the fifth game of the best-of-seven final, TPS crushed HPK 6-2 in Hämeenlinna, after losing only 3 of the spring’s 15 crucial play-off encounters.
     
The last time the Canada Trophy was mounted in the TPS boardroom in Finland’s former capital was in 2001.
      At that time, nobody would have believed that it would take nine years before the cup would be back there, for during the 1990s and into the new century TPS were the dominant force in the sport hereabouts.
      They won eight titles between 1989 and 2001 and were only twice out of the top three during that purple patch.
      Thereafter, things have been a lot less easy for the team that holds top billing for SM-Liiga titles won (10): the nearest they have come since then was a runners-up place in 2004.
     
As noted in our earlier articles, TPS already had a chance to clinch victory with a 4-0 clean sweep at their home arena on Tuesday. HPK had other ideas, and squeezed out a 2-1 win through a goal late in the third period to keep themselves just about alive. Any hopes that the HPK players and fans might have had of making a historic recovery were dashed on Wednesday night in Hämeenlinna, where one could have easily mistaken that this was a TPS home game - so ecstatic was the atmosphere in the Turku supporters’ camp.
      The visitors brushed the home team aside and recorded an emphatic 6-2 victory (3-2, 1-0, 2-0) in a match that was effectively over well before the scoreline was made to look even worse by two empty-net Turku goals right at the death.
     
It took coach Kai Suikkanen a year and a half to get TPS back on its feet as an ice hockey team worthy of consideration.
      One of the key factors behind TPS's success in the playoffs was the effective use of goalies. Suikkanen used alternately both David Leggio and Atte Engren to guard the TPS net.
      HPK number one goalie Teemu Lassila, in turn, failed to perform optimally. This was obvious also in the last of the final games. The puck found its way to the back of the HPK net perhaps needlessly easily in the first and second TPS goals from Antti Halonen and Tomas Plihal.
      In the first period, HPK even held the lead for a brief moment. First Jukka Laamanen produced the 1-1 power play equaliser, after which Miikka Männikkö made use of congestion in front of the TPS goal and slipped the puck into the net.
     
TPS’s 3-2 goal was scored, again on the power play, by American defenseman Lee Sweatt, a relatively recent recruit to the side. Sweatt joined TPS from Riga in the Russian Kontinental Hockey League in January, and he has been an inspiration in the latter part of the season.
      Midway through the second period, Markus Norlund stepped up to make it 4-2, and the countdown to the title had begun.
      In the last two minutes of the final period, Michal Birner and Norlund put the icing on the cake with two more goals after the home team had replaced its goalie with a sixth player.
     
So TPS take the honours and HPK the silver medals.
      Regular season winners JYP of Jyväskylä, who were champions in 2008/2009, finished third after beating KalPa of Kuopio in a sudden-death bronze medal game.
     
It was a season of upsets in many respects, and one that the local Helsinki area clubs will probably be happy to forget: HIFK Helsinki made it into the last eight but were dumped out by HPK in the quarter finals, and Espoo Blues and Helsinki Jokerit both failed to progress beyond the so-called "charity round" of the playoffs before the quarters.
      At the other end of the table, Ilves from Tampere (another side like TPS with a lot of history and no fewer than 16 national championship titles, though only one has been gained in the era of the SM-Liiga since 1975/76) survived the ignominy of a relegation play-off battle against Jokipojat from Joensuu, and so the make-up of the SM-Liiga will remain unchanged next season.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Summer comes early for Blues and Jokerit (29.3.2010)
  TPS Turku move to within one victory of Finnish ice hockey title (26.4.2010)
  Turku and Hämeenlinna are finalists in hockey playoffs upset (20.4.2010)

Links:
  SM-Liiga (Wikipedia)
  TPS Turku (Wikipedia)

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