Championship week is here as the Calgary Dragons take on the West Kendall Platoon in the S47 Challenge Cup finals! The SHL is about to showcase its greatest individual event and you are apart of it with your contributions to this post! You will be paid in TPE which is earned by completing the tasks below. Each assignment will vary in TPE amount so please read each task carefully! You can earn up to '16' uncapped TPE . Feel free to do more than that, but you won't get the credit for anything over 16.

[Note: All tasks that are not league-specific can be done for either the SHL or the SMJHL playoffs.]

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Being able to return home with the cup after his third season with the Anaheim Outlaws was obviously a huge accomplishment. Because it was "only" the Four Star Cup and not the Challenge Cup, so the media interest wasn't huge especially since the cup came to Switzerland for the third year in a row, thanks to Basil Magnicotta and Nicolaj Müller winning it the previous 2 years with the St. Louis Scarecrows. However, Seger's family and friends showed up at the airport and they had rented a bus to drive back to his home town of Flawil. Once there, the cup was brought to a restaurant/pub and the party was going on the whole night. It all was a lot of fun and for the whole event, there was plenty of alcohol. If you combine that with the jetlag, it should be obvious that Seger spent most of his remaining 2 days back home in bed. Although he did have the chance to catch up with a couple of former team mates before he had to head back to the airport.


Mathias Seger has already been on the sheet of 12 SHL games. In three, he even got some ice time in the S46 conference finals. In those three games, Seger spent 38 minutes on the ice and got awarded 3 hits and blocked 2 shots. He even managed to get sent to the penalty box for two minutes. Before S47, Seger received the offer to play for the Minnesota Chiefs full time, but he decided to play one more season with the Anaheim Outlaws. Overall Seger feels ready to make the step to the big league. The physicality is already there and his skills with and without the puck should be enough to have a spot within the top four defensemen of a non-elite SHL team. With the whole Minnesota tampering case still up in the air, the future has once again become uncertain, but Seger is prepared to move north this summer.


2. While West Kendall can certainly count on two very good GMs, in this category, the advantage still goes to Calgary, simply because the Dragons are the bigger surprise team in the finals and they needed a very strong management team to even get them here. Also JR and Wongy have never scouted me, which is another clear point in favour of Calgary.

4. West Kendall Platoon captain Alex Light certainly has the ability to make the deceisive difference in this series. He's a great captain and well respected by his team, whith which he has already won two Challenge Cups. Meanwhile Calgary is a very young team that still has to find its identity.

5. Mild surprise - The Calgary Dragons were once a dynasty, maybe the strongest one the SHL has ever seen. Now, it was clear that this couldn't continue forever and it hasn't, but the management from their glory days hasn't changed and they obviously know what they're doing. Now not a lot of people would have expected to see them back on top so soon, but it was never a question whether they would be back at all.

7. No surprise - The surprise happened last season when the West Kendall Platoon missed the play offs entirely. Even though they have a ton of players in regression, they were never a weak team and missed out on the play offs simply by bad luck. With their dominant win in the finals, the Platoon have proved this point.


The biggest name missing in the SMJHL finals were definitely the St. Louis Scarecrows. After winning the Four Star Cup in all of the three previous seasons, the Scarecrows exited this years cup run in the semi finals against the recent expansion team - the Anaheim Outlaws. And you can't say that St. Louis got hit hard with call ups after keeping most people down for three seasons. Quite the contrary, the Scarecrows finished the regular season of season 47 in first place. 4 points ahead of the 2nd placed Montral Militia and 12 points ahead of the Anaheim Outlaws. So one could have definitely expected to see the Scarecrows in the finals.
The reasons for their shortcoming arent that they didn't take their semi final opponent seriously. You don't win three titles in three seasons without playing your best hockey in every playoff series. The reason was that the Outlaws were just too good in this seasons playoff campaign. They were a better team than the regular season showed. For some reason, they just took a big slump in the middle of the season. They also switched Jerry Mander from the wing to their defense to increase their defensive depth. And the Outlaws just grew together perfectly during this post season. Not once did they change their lines. From game 1 against the Lions until game 7 against the Militia, the players had always the same linemates.



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