Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
Also, what's up with HK Jesenice playing both in the Austrian and the Slovenian league? How's that work?
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well around 2000 a couple of Austrian teams went bankrupt and the league had problems to find enough teams ... from 2003 to 2005, there were only 7 teams in the league, so they eventually decided to let foreign teams join the league. Slovenian team HK Jesenice was the first team to do so in 2006, with Olimpija Ljubljana (also from Slovenia) and Szekesfehervar (from Hungary) joining a year later. Slovenia still had a league on their own though, and they decided that Jesenice and Ljubljana would automatically be qualified for the Slovenian playoffs as well. Generally, those two teams were clearly superior to the teams of the Slovenian league and battled it out for the Slovenian championship every year (Jesenice won it 9 times, Ljubljana 14 times ... no one else has won it so far). And that kids is the story of how Jarrod Skalde managed to play for the same team in the two different leagues.
HK Jesenice folded in 2012 by the way. They had massive financial problems during their final years and were forced to rely on youth players a lot. They became a bottom dweller because of that and eventually had to give up completely.