HS Rīga/Prizma capture Virslīga title

Since Samsung pulled sponsoring rights to the league back in 2008, the Latvian league has been in a downward trend, however, there was something bright about the season, finally something to build off of. Despite the Tukums/Ventspils project did not start up this season and we lost traditional club SK Liepājas Metalurgs, HK Kurbads, from Ogre joined the league and Daugavpils got their club back as well.

Outside HK Daugavpils, who was young and restarting, the league was very competitive, HK Kurbads had won the league about a week before the end, Rīga/Prizma was forced to start out from the first round on the second to last day. Zemgale/LLU has themselves a wonderful season, before the start of the season, I made the prediction that if their goalkeeping and defending shaped up a little, they could be dangerous club. Well, they proved me right, they had themselves once again the second most goals scored, however, this time, they conceded the least amount of goals and earned themselves the 2nd overall seed. Ozolnieki/MONARCH, given their age and experience have not been as strong in the league as years past and against the better clubs in the league, they found themselves getting routed a couple of times, however, a strong 4th place finish gave them home ice advantage in the First Round.  

The First Round of the play-offs was rather uneventful, we knew going into the series that HS Rīga/Prizma would make rather easy work of HK Daugavpils and they did just that sweeping the series. However, Dinamo Juniors inexperience cost them badly in their series with Ozolnieki/MONARCH and they as well were swept out of the play-offs. The run for Rīga/Prizma has kept up through to the Semi-finals, they opened up their series with Zemgale by blasting them in the first match and kept that going to an easy 3-1 series victory pointing them into the Finals for the first time in their history. The experience for Ozolnieki/MONARCH kicked in big time, they pushed Kurbads, forcing them to make mistakes and capitalize on them, however, the skill of Kurbads was enough to put them into the Finals for the first time in history.

Large crowds, banners, drums, horns and chants are not something that have been very common in the league but this year was very different. Kurbads opened up the series by blasting Rīga/Prizma 10:2, such a large beating it looked like the series was about to be a snore. Rīga/Prizma forgot about the first match and just moved on as they squeaked out a victory in the second game 3:4 in overtime, taking the series back to Rīga with them tied. Kurbads once again showed by they were the best club in the league and routed Prizma once again, this time 6:1. Just like before though, Prizma bounced back to even up the series after falling behind early in the third match to level the series again heading back to Ogre. Prizma was able to break the series by winning the 5th match in a shoot-out and was able to close out the series on home ice with the minimum score line of 1:0 to capture their first ever title.
It was a very entertaining end to the season, two clubs who just hated each other, took every chance they could to level opposing players and get in their faces but clean. With the coverage Best4Sports provided, the quality product we watch during the play-offs, the interest of fans and projects coming up, it appears the Latvian league is back on the up. It may not be what was here 6-7-8 years ago, but things do look better.

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