Kärpät Oulu had an impressive Champions Hockey League campaign and they were dominant in the Liiga regular season as well, finishing first for the second straight year. Now they will try to repeat as playoff champions as well, but in the highly competitive Finnish league, they will not go through unchallenged. 

by Vilja Päätalo

The Liiga playoffs begin on Saturday, with teams placed seventh through 10th playing a preliminary round, with the two winners rounding out the eight quarter-finalists. Seven of those teams will be challengers to de-throne Kärpät Oulu.

Kärpät have dominated the Finnish ice hockey scene the past couple years. The Oulu-based squad won the Liiga championship last season, they were the best Finnish team in CHL and they won the Liiga regular season this year, too. As the playoffs start it's impossible to rank the team as anything other than number-one favourites.

Hailing from the northernmost Liiga city, Kärpät have the strongest material in Liiga on their side. As if that wasn't enough, their head coach Lauri Marjamäki is one of the most talented coaches in Finland. All the players know the team's style of play by heart and they have players in reserve in case someone gets injured, which makes Kärpät very hard to stop. 

They have three strong offensive lines. The best line of the season – consisting of Joonas Donskoi, Joonas Kemppainen and Julius Junttila – is a strong candidate to make the Finnish team as a whole at this spring's World Championships. Their second line is formed around Ben Maxwell and Lukáš Kašpar, both of whom joined the team from the KHL at the trade deadline, and the third line has all the experience in the form of Esa Pirnes and Mika Pyörälä. 

Sounds like the perfect team? Well, luckily for the other contenders, they do have a problem with their power play and playing shorthanded. Maybe “problems” is too strong a word, but they're just not as good as last year when Kärpät won gold.

Tappara Tampere played against Kärpät in the Liiga finals last season. At the beginning of this season, however, they lost their head coach Jukka Rautakorpi to the KHL and Jussi Tapola, an inexperienced newcomer, stepped in. No one expected much from him and the start was rough, but a great spring moved Tappara into second spot at the end of the regular season.

They are Kärpät's number one threat, sharing the strength of having a strong reserve of players. They do also have some top class individuals: Juha Metsola, the best goalkeeper of the season and Olli Palola, who scored the most goals in Liiga this season. 

But these two teams – both of which played in the CHL – aren't the only ones in the Liiga playoffs. 

Lukko Rauma played extremely well towards the end of the regular season. Their strength is experience and having a strong power play. Unfortunately for them, their game is quite weak compared to Kärpät when it comes to other aspects. Then again, fortunately for them, the playoffs are a different world. And in this world, experienced players like Janne Niskala, Ville Vahalahti and Toni Koivisto become extremely valuable.

A team that has been good for many seasons in a row, JYP Jyväskylä, have a strong offence which boasts the likes of World Championship candidate Jani Tuppurainen, but JYP have had problems with playing consistently. 

IFK Helsinki played well in the CHL and they are one of the strongest teams on paper, but they have had a tough time in recent months. Ville Husso, their young goaltender, has had problems since playing in the World Junior Championships in Canada in January. They did, however, play a bit better towards the very end of the regular season and they have offensive talent led by Tomáš Zaborský. 

The biggest problem for the Helsinki team is that they have to start in the preliminary round against the other Tampere team, Ilves. 

The team that could surprise many comes from Espoo, just outside Helsinki. The Blues didn't play in the CHL and they had a rather bad start to the season, but they caught fire in the latter half of the regular season. They are a hard-working team that has an excellent rookie goalie in Eetu Laurikainen, as well as Kim Hirschovits, 32, who is playing the best season of his life. In the quarter-finals they play against JYP and these will be entertaining, intense games.

Out of the other CHL teams, also participating in the Liiga playoffs are KalPa Kuopio, who had problems with scoring towards the end of the season, and SaiPa Lappeenranta, who narrowly missed avoiding the preliminary round. In this round, known as the "pity playoffs", they will face Ässät Pori. SaiPa's number one concern heading into this round is their experienced goalie, Jussi Markkanen, who hasn't played too well lately.

One of the Finnish CHL teams had a terrible season and that was TPS Turku. The team started the season with huge expectations but they failed in almost every aspect: they fired their head coach twice, sold almost all of their players and played the end of the season mainly with their junior players. It couldn't have gone much worse for them.

In the preliminary round a team needs two wins (best-of-five) to advance to the quarter-finals. From that point, a series will end when one team has four wins (best-of-seven). The finals will start on 15 April.

Find the complete playoff schedule and up-to-date results here at the league website.