wouldnt mind going, is there a quick (and simple) way to understand the rules and do get bit lost in league/cup/conference set up!!
Away tickets are on sale at the opposition's rink.
I'll go through it as brief as I can but if anyone has any more questions feel free to ask!
All the teams can ice 11 imports and the rest of their bench is made up of Brits.
There are 5 skaters and 1 netminder (this is classed as 5v5) on the ice per team but a team can choose to drop their netty to play an extra skater if they need to.
3 20 minute periods with 5 mins of sudden death 4v4 overtime if it's a draw. This is followed by a pen shoot out if there's still no winner.
2 points for a win, 1 point for an OT/SO loss.
The two league conferences are:
Us
Them (Nottingham Pan****s)
Sheffield Steelers
Cardiff Devils
Belfast Giants
Hull Stingrays
Fife Flyers
Dundee Stars
Braehead Clan
Edinburgh
Each team plays the teams in their conference 4 times at home & 4 times away and 3 times at home & 3 times away against the teams in the other conference. There is an overall league champion. Due to only the games against the other teams in your conference counting towards the conference standings it is possible to win the league without winning your conference (see below). This happened in the season just gone.
End of the season there's play offs with. The top 8 seeded teams play in the quarter finals like this:
1st v 8th
2nd v 7th
3rd v 6th
4th v 5th
The quarters are 2 legged (home and away) and decided on aggregate score.
The conference system has complicated how the teams are seeded but I'll try my best to explain:
#1 is the overall league champion.
#2 is the winner of the the other conference or the winner of the conference that contains the league champions if they don't win their conference! If this happens the winners of the conference which doesn't contain the league champions are seeded #3.
The other 5 are seeded by the overall league standings.
The four winning teams play semis (Saturday) and then in the final (Sunday) at the NIC in Nottingham.
The challenge cup has similar groups as the conferences but the Giants swap with the Stingrays. Each team plays each other home and away. Top 4 from each group qualify for the two legged quarter finals.
I'll be honest with you the whole system needs looking at but it's the best way atm with the amount of teams in the Elite League. The lower Premier League has a few teams that could make the step up but choose to stay where they are.
As for the rules, I wouldn't worry too much about learning them straight away. This bloke's been going for years and he doesn't seem to know any of them.
