The ZSC Lions were the best team of the season. But in the Belle that counts for little, the playoff on Tuesday is an absolute test of nerves. It’s not always the stars who decide such games – a look at the ZSC master shooters shows that.
It has become quieter around ZSC captain Patrick Geering (right) – in 2018 he decided the Belle against Lugano with his 1-0 in the seventh minute.
Michael Buholzer / Keystone
Morgan Samuelsson. Steve McCarthy. Patrick Geering. These are the three men who have already shot ZSC to the title in a seventh play-off final game. They are not the classic offensive spectacle makers.
The Swede Samuelsson made his debut in the National League A at the age of 33 after reaching Zurich via winding paths in January 2001 – his previous stops were the international hockey strongholds of Zell am See, Weisswasser and Thurgau – as a replacement for the injured Canadian Patrick Lebeau.
Samuelsson, who died of heart failure in September 2023, had never won a title before in his career. And was surplus in the first four finals. But it was he who shot the ZSC to victory in Lugano in extra time. Unimpressed by the riots in Resega, he said to the TV cameras: “When I got the target and started, I knew: That would score a goal.” Samuelsson, later a shooting coach at many Swiss clubs, often spoke of a charming immodesty; he once told his teammates in Zurich: “If you don’t know what to do with the puck, just give it to me.”
Master marksman Steve McCarthy was greeted with open hostility in 2011
Steve McCarthy joined the ZSC Lions in October 2011, he was also a largely obscure substitute foreigner. As a greeting, “20 Minutes Online” wrote: “Will the ZSC get the slowest defender? Can this experiment be more than a laughing stock?” And quoted an anonymous source from Finland, where the Canadian had previously played, who said: “If the people of Zurich come to the conclusion that McCarthy is suitable for the NLA, then they must have consumed LSD. Only when everything is in your head can someone get the impression that McCarthy is fast.”
McCarthy, now 43, scored a single goal in the 2012 play-offs: the golden one. To this day, two small numbers can still give SC Bern fans nightmares: 2.5. With so many seconds left, McCarthy scored the goal to make it 2-1. The hit was only validated after minutes of video study; Thanks to him, ZSC snatched the title from their opponents after a 3-1 deficit in the series.
McCarthy, now an assistant coach with the Columbus Blue Jackets, remembered this in an interview with the NZZ in 2022: “I just looked at the clock. It was clear that there would be no counterattack, even if we lost the puck immediately. It was a bit of an act of desperation because we were pretty much at the end of our energy reserves after a long, hard play-off. And then I actually scored, no one was more surprised than me.” And he showed some subtle self-irony when he said: “It’s true, I was probably the slowest defender in the league. But everything still worked out quite well.”
The last ZSC master shooter to date is Patrick Geering, the veteran of the current squad. Geering, 34, has been captain of Zurich since 2017, and on Tuesday he will play his 908th game for ZSC.
In 2017/18 he was in the prime of his career and was the third most productive defender in the league. He played the last games of the final series against Lugano with a handicap – he was hit in the shoulder by a check from the tough Maxim Lapierre in game 4 and then had to be fit. In the Belle he scored after just seven minutes, his goal was enough for ZSC to win because Lukas Flüeler managed a shutout. Things have become quieter around Geering; He has never scored a goal in the play-offs since then.
“I need a hero,” Bonnie Tyler sang in 1984, before the play-off mode was introduced in Switzerland. Play-off history shows that it can be practically anyone. Other clubs are also familiar with the phenomenon: that mysterious role players make themselves immortal as master marksmen in playoff games. Robin Leblanc in Davos, Marc Weber and David Jobin in Bern.
It would certainly not be forbidden if the big, well-known names decided the championship on Tuesday in the Swiss Life Arena and justified their royal salaries: Denis Malgin and Sven Andrighetto at ZSC, Antti Suomela and Damien Riat at Lausanne.
But you don’t have to take LSD to imagine that things could turn out differently. And the hockey gods once again feel like dragging someone out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Scott Harrington, for example, a rather pale defensive defender who was only used for the first time in the final in Game 6 as a replacement for the injured striker Rudolfs Balcers.
The little-considered substitute foreigner Scott Harrington would have a worthy biography for a master shooter
Understandably, ZSC coach Marc Crawford had little desire to explain the state of health of Balcers and defender Yannick Weber, who was also injured. When asked about a possible comeback for the two, he only said: “We’ll see.” That’s how it is in the play-offs, it’s the time of secrecy and poker faces.
Harrington will play again without Balcers. The 31-year-old Canadian has never scored in 19 appearances for ZSC – and generally hasn’t scored in the play-offs since 2013. This is a biography that is nebulous enough that it could later be rewritten into a heroic epic.
Before this bell, there are many things that speak for the ZSC: The Zurich team were, there can be no serious debate about this, the best team in this championship. They dominated the qualification and reached the final in the play-offs without defeat. There, Lausanne turned out to be a tougher opponent than expected, in a strange series in which the home team won six times in a row.
There’s a lot at stake for the people of Zurich – considering their expenses, six years is too long a time to wait for a championship title. Anything can happen in a Game 7, it’s no longer about quality, but about coolness and strong nerves.
The ZSC has had dark years with quite a few disappointments. The team already lost a bell in 2022, 1:3 away in Zug. The trauma of that final series lost after a 3-0 lead still resonates today; it is in the minds of the players who were there back then. Now the ZSC has a great opportunity to overcome the trauma. That’s what we need on Tuesday: a hero.