Is Kärpät just unstoppable?

Four weeks ago the situation in Finland’s Liiga looked a lot different on the top. Lahti seemed to be the team to beat while Kärpät was suffering from an early season losing streak. But when people turned their calendars to the october sheet, Kärpät also opened up a new page in their season. In all 12 october games they came out victorious. In all but three games they held their opposition at 2 goals or fewer, including 4 shutouts for goalie Jussi Rynnäs. The scoring comes from different players every night, may it be Mika Pyörälä, Joonas Kemppainen, Joonas Donskoi or Ben Maxwell. They all chipped in with goals during October, while former NHL defense crack Lasse Kukkonen also likes to contribute from the blue line.

Momentarily they look like the perfect team (especially after tonight’s 7-0 rout over Hämeenlinna, starting November right on the same note), but so did Lahti three weeks ago. But for the Pelicans October wasn’t as golden as for Oulu. Lahti lost 6 out of their last 8 games and dropped from first to 6^th position in the league. In this span they could only score 3 goals in two games, which happened to be the two wins against Lukko and KalPa. For all the other games their offense looked pretty bad compared with their early season run. The biggest problem at the moment seems to be the missing help for top scorer Radek Smolenak, who stayed consistent during their latest crisis with 4 additional goals to his record.

On Halloween KalPa had to face their biggest nightmare, when they went to Turku for the crucial match between the two last teams in the league. It was TPS’ Niclas Lucenius, who took over the role of the grim reaper that night by leading his team alone to a 3-1 lead, which KalPa did not recover from. In the end TPS won 6-3, including another assist from Lucenius. KalPa now sits in last place while Turku could catch some air and left the last spot. And KalPa doesn’t show any signs to move up again any time soon. Tonight they took a beating at home losing 6-0 against Espoo.

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