Ice hockey: EHC Munich missed the DEL Sport final again against Mannheim

Dhe game wasn’t over yet, nor was the series, and certainly not the season. And yet, from his team’s point of view, Tobias Rieder could hardly have summed up the semi-final series better than with this sentence that he spoke during the third break 20 minutes before the end of the game: “We are not ripped off enough,” said the EHC Red Bull Munich striker on Friday evening when the score was 1:2 from EHC’s point of view in the fifth semi-final game of the German Ice Hockey League (DEL) against Adler Mannheim. Rieder had previously scored, it was his eighth playoff goal, making him the top scorer in this year’s playoffs. But his goal wasn’t enough. The Munich team lost 1:4 in Mannheim, and with it the semi-final series with 1:4. The Mannheim team made it to the final for the first time since 2019. For the people of Munich, however, the summer break begins.

EHC coach Oliver David and captain Patrick Hager mourned the first two semi-final games, which the EHC lost in overtime despite good performances. “Those were the sticking points,” said Hager. “We played very well most of the time, we just didn’t win any more games,” said David, who compared the end of the season to the inevitable course of nature: at the beginning of every season there is life, at the end there is a kind of death. “We are starting again, like spring. The flowers will bloom again. We have sown new seeds, these will grow.”

Manager Christian Winkler made a big change before the season, eleven new regular players were integrated during the season. “This is half a new team,” emphasized David, just as new to Munich as his assistant coach Rob Leask. After a problematic start to the season – “We really struggled at the beginning,” said new defender Phillip Sinn – the team picked themselves up and finished fourth in the main round, scoring 100 points.

But, as in previous years, the goal was to win the championship. Players and those in charge repeated this again and again. Just recently, in the middle of the playoffs, Winkler explained: “We compete every year to become champions. I always say: For everything else, if we said we wanted to come third or fourth, we would be spending too much money.” Captain Hager also emphasized this on Friday, after the end of the season: “The goal in Munich is to win every year. And that’s right.” The quality was high enough “to be able to win this year.”

A total of 14 EHC players are older than 30 years

But: The last title was now three years ago – and in the past three seasons, the Munich team were pretty far away from the title. They finished the DEL main rounds twice in fifth place and this season in fourth place. In the playoffs there was a clear 1:4 series defeat not only now, but already in the 2024 semi-finals (against the Fischtown Pinguins from Bremerhaven). Last season it ended in the quarter-finals, also against Mannheim. There has been a gap between the championship claim and reality for the third season in a row.

A look at the squad shows possible explanations. In Phillip Sinn, 22, and Philipp Krening, 21, the EHC has promising talents, all of whom have completed the group academy in Liefering near Salzburg. Veit Oswald, 21, was the best U23 player of the DEL season. In the German player segment between the ages of 23 and 30, however, the Munich team currently only has one player: defender Maximilian Daubner, 28. Some of the strongest German DEL players in this category were once in Munich (Mannheim’s Justin Schütz, Berlin’s Frederik Tiffels) or have opted for other top German clubs in the recent past (Alexander Ehl, Leon Gawanke, both Mannheim; Dominik Bokk, Cologne; Leon Hüttl, Ingolstadt). The contract with Luis Schinko, a 25-year-old national team candidate who moved to Munich last summer, was terminated after just a few months. Schinko returned to Wolfsburg in October.

The squad is getting old: six German regular players, including Rieder, Yasin Ehliz, Maximilian Kastner and Mathias Niederberger, are 33 or older, and a total of 14 EHC players have already exceeded the 30-year mark. A breath of fresh air is likely to come from Lower Bavaria: According to SZ information, Straubing’s attacker Elis Hede has been signed for the coming season. The 25-year-old is currently with the German national team and scored 19 goals this DEL season. It is questionable whether Veit Oswald, Munich’s most striking young player of the season, will also wear the EHC jersey next season, as several NHL clubs, including Leon Draisaitl’s Edmonton Oilers, have expressed interest.

The 37-year-old captain Patrick Hager is positive about the future. “Compared to the last two years, we have achieved a great turnaround,” he said at Magentasport. “If we keep the core of the team, we can build on that very well.”