It was only a few days before Finland's U20 team was supposed to travel to Canada for the World Junior Championships when Jukurit and Ässät informed that they had covid-19 cases in their teams and per the guidance of local health officials the teams entered a 6-day quarantine. Two players of the U20 team, centre Aatu Räty and defenceman Rami Määttä were among those placed in quarantine, which in turn meant they'd miss the entire tournament due to not being able to travel to the tournament site on time.
Later in the week, HPK also informed of a covid case in the team, which for a moment raised questions about HPK defenceman Petteri Nurmi's status as he had travelled with the U20 team to Canada the night before. Nurmi was exempt from quarantine due to the excessive testing surrounding the U20 team at the time.
For the Finnish team, losing Räty and Määttä was a setback, but as head coach Antti Pennanen told Jatkoaika prior to leaving, the team must perform at the top level whether those two players are with the team or not.
Lucky for Finland, nine of its players are no strangers to the tournament having played at it last year already. One of the nine is Toronto Maple Leafs prospect Topi Niemelä who was also named best defenceman at last year's tournament.
Young Kärpät defenceman Niemelä has shown some great offensive skills in his game, but he sees his defensive side as something to work on. Jatkoaika recently interviewed the player about his top-notch season during which he has not only led his team in points carrying the golden helmet on his head but was the league leader for a moment too.
− I always aim to develop my overall skills, but in the last off-season, I focused on physicality. Getting more strength is one of my top goals in developing myself alongside improving my defensive skills, Niemelä said.
− One of my personal goals for this season was to rise up as one of the leading defencemen in my team. After a tough season last year, I'm eager and fully motivated to show what I got when I'm healthy.
Niemelä's goals for the upcoming World Juniors were similar. He knows that the best defenceman title from last year's tournament means nothing in this year's tournament and that he aims to be even better.
We shall see whether Niemelä renews his title with a new kind of motivation when Finland starts their World Juniors journey on December 26th.
The new arena opens with Antti Saarela's record-shattering night
All stories must come to an end at some point, and at the end of November, that story was the last Liiga games at Tampereen Jäähalli, more commonly known as Hakametsä. The oldest arena in Finland retired as the home base for the Tampere teams Tappara and Ilves when the teams moved into the newly built Nokia Arena. The new arena also will serve as the main stage for the 2022 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championships in May.
Opening night on the ice at the new arena was the kind of fireworks that probably no one had expected to see. Chicago Blackhawks' prospect Antti Saarela blew up the Tampere crowd by scoring a hat-trick within the first ten minutes of the game. With 9:49 on the clock during his third goal, Saarela broke the previous record of quickest hattrick set by Ari Peltola in 1979 by nearly a minute.
Fireworks didn't end there. The final score showed 6−3 on the board for the so-called away team, Ilves. Clearly, losing the opening night left Tappara fuming inside for the following day's second showdown at the new arena. Tensions ran high as multiple roughing calls were called in the first and second period, whilst Tappara's scoring proved more effective putting a 7−0 score on the board with Anton Levtchi and Otto Rauhala's two-goal night.
Can an old coach change the course for Ässät?
If October had started off with a bang with the first coaching change of the season, the second change in November was more mellow. Ässät head coach Ari-Pekka Selin was already supposed to leave the team after this season, but with the team's lacklustre success and them practically holding the fort at the bottom of the league's standings, it was easy to let the man go early.
In order to salvage the remainder of the season, a familiar face stepped behind the bench. New head coach Karri Kivi has a long history with the team. He has been a part of their coaching staff as an assistant coach during the 2002−06 and 2008−11 seasons and then taking the head coaching position during 2011−13 seasons. In fact, his second season as the Ässät head coach was the kind of a success story that lead to a championship win.
So far, under Kivi's guidance, Ässät have played six games out of which they lost the first four and then won the last two before the team went into isolation due to 14 covid-19 cases in the team.
What the Pori team likely finds the best news in their despair is winning against their arch enemy Lukko for the first time since December 2019. The teams had met ten times between then and now, with Lukko taking the win in every single one of them.