Can someone explain the way the Jr.A SM-Liiga works with these other subdivisions

FWF

Cheers
May 20, 2019
61
120
Prince George, BC
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I'm working on some stuff for U20 players, and I noticed the "Alkusarja" and the "Alempi Jatkosarja" divisions in this league. I'm just confused cause a lot of the teams from the normal division are in this "Alkusarja" one. If someone can just give me a quick explanation on how all this shit works, it would be highly appreciated!
 

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LoveHateLeafs

Registered User
Jul 7, 2009
690
327
Since no one has stepped up, I'll try to answer your question to the best of my ability. Be warned that I don't actually speak Finnish, but I can generally navigate the Finnish Hockey federation's website, which I assume is where you're getting your data from.

Unlike North American junior hockey, which has two phases to the season, the Nuorten SM-Liiga season has three(or maybe four if you want to get technical):

1)Alkusarja

This is the first phase of the season and lasts from roughly the beginning of September to the middle of December. All 18 teams play each other as part of a balanced schedule that consists of ~35 games during this period. After this phase of the season ends in mid-December, the teams are separated. Then phase two starts.

2a)Nuorten SM-Liiga

The top ten teams from the alkusarja then play an 18-game mini season from the beginning of January to the beginning of March. These teams have no further contact with the bottom 8 teams during this phase, though they might later. At the end of this mini season, the teams are separated into the top 6 teams, the middle 3 teams, and the last-place team, whose season ends.

2b)Nuorten SM-Liiga alemppi jatkosarja

In at the same time as the Nuorten SM-Liiga, the bottom 8 teams from the alkusarja play their own 18-game mini season in parallel. The difference between this and Nuorten SM-Liiga(aside from the lower skill level) is that one or two teams from an even lower level of Finnish U20 hockey are added to this group. At the end of this mini-season the teams are separated into the top team(whose season continues) and the other teams, whose seasons end.

3)Play-off Play-in (my name for it, I don't know what the Finns call it)

The middle three teams from the upper league(Nuorten SM-Liiga) and the top team from the bottom league(Nuorten SM-Liiga alemppi jatkosarja) are paired off(I don't know how) and each pair plays a best of three series.

4)Playoffs

The winners of the two play-off play-in series are then added to the top six teams from the upper league and they go to an 8-team playoff which then proceeds conventionally(best of five series). From this we get the final champion.

Why do the Finns do things this way? I have no idea. The idea of having an initial phase to the season followed by a second phase where teams are grouped according to success seems to exist at all levels of Finnish amateur hockey, though it doesn't for the Mestis and Liiga. That kind of idea seems absurd to North Americans, but remember that junior hockey is not a business in Europe. There's nothing to be lost if a big-market teams fails to make the upper league. Maybe they view it as a way of increasing difficulty for the best players, though the best players don't automatically end up in the upper mini-league. Entry only depends on team success. For example, in his pre-draft season, Kaapo Kakko's junior team failed to make the cut, so he didn't play against the best junior teams after December 2017.

This is also a recent system (at this level) as far as I know. It only began in the 2017-18 season. Before that they had a normal(for us) system where all 18-20 teams(the number fluctuated) playing a longer regular season followed by playoffs.

This also makes stat-tracking difficult since sites like Eliteprospects generally don't keep track of the various phases of the regular season. They just lump all the seasons together. A players who plays in the upper league has a harder road than if he were playing in the lower league and his stats will likely reflect that. Likewise, a player like Jesperi Kotkaniemi played his junior games in a league consisting of almost twenty teams, so maybe he's somewhere in between. He would have had more games against weaker teams but also more against strong ones. These factors need to be taken into account to do a proper apples-to-apples comparison.
 

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