The ZSC Lions won game 7 against Lausanne HC 2-0 and are the logical Swiss champions. The people of Zurich can enjoy the moment – but it’s also important to ensure that it won’t be another six years before the next title.
Cheers in blue and white: The ZSC Lions are champions.
Urs Flüeler / Keystone
The ZSC Lions’ splendid start-to-finish victory was a demonstration of power. The Zurich team won the qualification and only lost three games in the play-offs. You can’t become a champion much more confidently. And it was particularly impressive how the ZSC overcame the absences of key players Rudolfs Balcers and Yannick Weber as well as the early injury-related loss of the most important individual Denis Malgin in the deciding game.
The ZSC is the deserved champion. There is nothing accidental about his triumph; it follows the logic of money: nobody can afford a more expensive team. The ZSC reacts sensitively to this issue, but it speaks in favor of the club that it can afford such a luxurious squad. The last five titleless years have shown that top players alone do not guarantee a championship. Nobody can claim that the ZSC dominates the National League year after year; the championship is now too balanced for that. But with a certain regularity you should be able to gain something from these expenses.
The big hit this spring was therefore overdue. Two championship titles in nine years are not an exciting result for a club that has hardly any financial limits. The management team is well aware of this. She also felt the growing pressure. Yes, the organization is excellent. Yes, the youth department is doing wonderful things. And yes, the move to the Swiss Life Arena was carefully managed; The ZSC consistently attracts more than 11,000 spectators in Altstetten.
But ultimately the laws of sport apply everywhere. In its self-perception, the ZSC is one of the leading premium organizations in European ice hockey. To support this status, continuous moments of fame and honor are needed.
Before Marc Crawford, no coach over the age of 60 became champions in the play-off era
This is also why the club management remembered coach Marc Crawford in December 2022. The NHL-tried Canadian led ZSC to the title in 2014 and has had many advocates in the club since then. Crawford was a nostalgia signing. This doesn’t always work in real life when rehashing old romances, because your memory plays tricks and reality can’t keep up with your imagination. The ZSC can tell you about it: Arno Del Curto’s comeback failed badly in 2019. And things got off to a bad start with Crawford too: in the spring of 2023 he insulted a referee as a “cocksucker”, and the results were poor.
But Crawford’s commitment was also a signal. Anyone who hires a coach from this age group doesn’t want to develop something for tomorrow, they want to win today. With the title, the Canadian fulfilled his mission. He turned 63 in February; He is the first coach over the age of 60 since the introduction of the play-offs in the National League in 1985/86.
Coach Marc Crawford celebrates the victory with his players. He had already led the ZSC to the championship title in 2014.
Ennio Leanza / Keystone
Crawford was obviously the right tamer for these experienced and highly talented Lions. This team didn’t need a tactical revolutionary, but rather someone to massage the many egos in the collective. Crawford’s recipe was simple: shuffle the lines so wildly throughout virtually the entire qualifying period that no one can be too sure of his status. This caused some internal irritation here and there, but it worked.
The not-so-conciliatory words of ZSC CEO Peter Zahner may also have resonated with Crawford, who said after Crawford’s farewell after a 0-4 quarter-final series loss against Bern in 2016: “We’ve been brutally predictable lately. We always played the same way, no matter what the opponent was called or what the score was. The five years with Bob Hartley and Marc Crawford were good. But now we wanted to bring a new mentality into it. NHL coaches are all very similar, they are extremely structured but also stubborn. In some cases the necessary flexibility was missing.”
It is difficult to say whether ZSC would have won the title with another coach. Possibly because no squad was nearly as dense and strong as that of Zurich. The sports director Sven Leuenberger managed to put together a team without weaknesses – also because in recent years the ZSC has bundled national players together like other people collect pictures during a football final: Dean Kukan, Christian Marti, Yannick Weber, Sven Andrighetto, Denis Hollenstein, Denis Malgin. And Crawford used his contacts and knowledge to help upgrade the foreign positions. It was he who brought play-off top scorer Derek Grant to Zurich.
Strong squad: ZSC players Justin Sigrist (right), Dean Kukan (left) and Derek Grant celebrate the 3-0 win in the fifth play-off final game.
Michael Buholzer / Keystone
All key players remain – can ZSC double?
The ZSC will retain all of its key players for the next season, and even the regular foreigners will continue to have their contracts. The players who tend to be of most interest to the NHL, No. 1 center Denis Malgin and Latvian globetrotter Rudolfs Balcers, have pledged not to even consider offers from overseas this summer.
These are very good prospects for making history. It’s been an incredibly long time since ZSC won two titles in a row. In 2000 and 2001 that was under coaches Kent Ruhnke and Larry Huras. The squads of those years read like a who’s who of the most popular professionals in ZSC history after the merger in 1997: Ari Sulander, Mathias Seger, Peter Jaks, Michel Zeiter, Edgar Salis. The latter was general manager of the ZSC for a long time, including during the first Crawford era. He has now been working as a youth sports director for a long time, but he was one of the driving forces in the effort to bring Crawford back.
The ZSC players will celebrate their 10th championship title on April 30th. The club became Swiss champions in 1936, 1949, 1961, 2000, 2001, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2024.
Patrick B. Kraemer / Keystone
Sulander and Seger’s jerseys hang under the roof of the Swiss Life Arena; they are heroes revered by an entire generation. It is rarely as loud in the stadium as when the cameras capture the now 46-year-old noble fan Seger drinking beer in the stands. There is nothing wrong with current players like Andrighetto, Malgin or Marti making themselves immortal for the modern ZSC of the Altstetten era and enjoying a similar status in twenty years as the grandees of yesteryear do today.
It’s a long way to the six titles of Seger and the four Sulanders. But the beginning has been made with this strong season. And given the current circumstances, there is no reason why the ZSC should not be at the beginning of a dynasty.
The ZSC fans celebrate the championship title in Zurich.
Patrick B. Kraemer / Keystone