Despite it being July, hockey fans are already planning their cold-weather weekends thanks to the Elite Ice Hockey League (EIHL) publishing its full list of fixtures for the 2022-23 season on 1 July. The first games of the season face-off in early September and the season runs through to April.
The EIHL is the premier ice hockey league in the United Kingdom and was created in 2003 after the demise of the Ice Hockey Superleague. It is ferocious and fiery with plenty of fouls and fights to go along with silky skating skills. In the 2021-22 season, the Belfast Giants won the regular season title for an astonishing fifth time and – after winning the Challenge Cup – just missed out on the Grand Slam when they lost the playoff final to their closest rivals, the Cardiff Devils. There is all to play for in the 2022-23 season!
Running alongside the regular season games, the Challenge Cup is a cup competition with a group stage followed by quarterfinals, semifinals, and the Challenge Cup Final in March. Unlike last year, all 10 EIHL teams will be involved in 2022-23. In the group stage, there are 3 groups with group winners advancing directly to the quarterfinals as seeds. The remaining 6 teams are ranked according to their points percentage with places 4 to 8 advancing to the quarterfinals. In 2022-23, the groups are:
- Group A: Belfast Giants, Dundee Stars, Fife Flyers, Glasgow Clan
- Group B: Cardiff Devils, Coventry Blaze, Guildford Flames
- Group C: Manchester Storm, Nottingham Panthers, Sheffield Steelers
For those who cannot wait until the start of the season of the Challenge Cup games, there’s an array of preseason games on offer. First off, the mighty Cardiff Devils welcome last year’s regular season champions the Belfast Giants on 19 August in a rematch of both last year’s playoff and Challenge Cup finals. Most of the EIHL teams are in preseason action with tickets on sale already for several games including Belfast Giants v Cardiff Devils (20 August), Manchester Storm v Cardiff Devils (28 August), and Sheffield Steelers v Nottingham Panthers (28 August).
The EIHL fixture list is ideal reading for sating one’s appetite before the National Hockey League (NHL) 2022-23 calendar kicks off. North America’s – and the world’s – premier ice hockey league has a regular season running from October to April followed by the playoffs with the Stanley Cup Finals in June 2023. Although Colorado Avalanche only lifted the Stanley Cup just a few weeks ago, hockey fanatics are ready to get their teeth (or lack thereof!) into the schedule for next season which was released last week.
For those not able to travel to Canada or the United States, the NHL has been able to organise European games once again; plans for which have been scuppered in the past few seasons due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The NHL Global Series Challenge features preseason match-ups between NHL sides and European sides with the Nashville Predators playing SC Bern (3 October) and the San Jose Sharks facing Eisbären Berlin (4 October). As the Predators and the Sharks will be in Europe, they play each other “home” (7 October) and “away” (8 October) in what are essentially regular season games but hosted by the O2 Arena in Prague. In November, Colorado Avalanche and the Columbus Blue Jackets travel to Finland to play a similar structure of a “home” (4 November) and “away” (5 November) game at the Nokia Arena, Tampere.