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Hi Gamers, Another ECL Elite season has passed which means another worthy champion has been crowned. Once again, a hearty round of applause from the community for ECL 5 Elite champions, Aapon Taikasauva. Now that the season is over, teams have been relegated, promoted, folded and re-made almost from the bottom up. Nevertheless, all the spectacle and activity that surrounds the Elite divison just goes to show one thing: there truly is no better place to be than the top tier of European EASHL hockey. The regular season In his preview ahead of the season, @janbonator mentioned SJK eSports, Written In The Stars, Carlsberg HC and MUKIMIEHET as his main "Contenders" to win the title. A suggestion that would prove quite wise as two of his picks ended up among the final four of the playoffs. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We begin by taking a look at the regular season. Northern Stars started the season like shot out of a cannon and remained at the top of the standings for most of the regular season. Part of this was their already strong roster featuring players like @cHIIMEERa, @Floor17 and @Rullstolskalas being bolstered by star players like @tbnantti and @plee999, but part of it was also the pace in which NOS played their games. Hungry from their dissapointing finish last season, captain cHIIMEERa had his team at the very top of the "games played" column for almost the full season. A wise strategy it would turn out as the team won enough games to make the playoffs. While janbonator put Aapon Taikasauva at the very top of his "challengers"-list in the Elite preview, he wasn't entirely sure if they would have time to find team chemistry before ECL 5 with all the transfers that had been made since last season. Aapon quickly put those doubts to rest by dominating just about every opponent for the duration of the regular season. They ended up finishing at the very top of the regular season standings ahead of the playoffs. Locked in a tight battle for 2nd place were Finnish behemoth franchises SJK eSports (winner of ECL 4 Elite), Written In The Stars, Carlsberg HC (winner of ECL 4 Pro) and Dynasty (finalist in ECL 4 Elite). Propelled forward by strong leadership from captains @Dominointi, @FlyerKungen, @Joonas Paatiala and @Snapster - all four teams delivered solid regular seasons marked by high-skill plays and solid team defense. In the case of Carlsberg and Written, geared a bit more towards offensive creativity while Dynasty and SJK have long been known as two of the sturdiest defending teams. Further down we find Northern Ascendancy who featured two of the top three scorers of the regular season, @MartindalexC and @Foppatofflan. It can be argued that no team is more difficult to defend against than NOR, at least when attacking on the rush. Creative offence was the hallmark of another solid regular season from this storied team. Rounding out the teams who made the playoffs were the previously mentioned Northern Stars and surprise team Rusty Blades. Led defensively by superb goaltender @Supreex and hard-hitting defender (and captain) @Tanski87, the Blades got some timely scoring from @Lamsa and crew to just nab the 8th and final playoff spot ahead of MUKIMIEHET. Of course, finishing 8th meant getting matched up against #1 seed Aapon Taikasauva. Of the teams who ended up in "No Mans Land", perhaps none were more suprising than MUKIMIEHET. However, their failure to make the playoffs arrived on the heels of reports saying there was unrest among the roster which in turn led to high-profile players @Erkki and @Aze leaving the team just before the trade deadline. It remains to be seen if captain MuKiMaisteri can keep the team together for ECL 6. Of the rest of the teams who ended up just outside the playoffs but avoided relegation - Sjukstugan, Kattiautomaatti and Silver Sword Griffins - all three were transplants from ECL Pro last season and perhaps needed a season of Elite tempo to get their legs under them before next season. At the bottom of the standings, Swedish teams Synergy Hockey and Nordic Lightning were both relegated after battling valiantly but failing to live up to their own standards. TIKI TALK and Nordic Nightmare ended up in Elite/Pro relegation where NN decided to fold which meant TIKI took on the lower seed of the Pro playoffs. The playoffs As the playoffs began, we were treated to four sets of superb playoff series between Aapon Taikasauva - Rusty Blades, Carlsberg HC - Northern Stars, SJK eSports - Northern Ascendancy and Written In The Stars - Dynasty. Carlsbergs series with Northern Stars ended up being quite the page-turner as both teams refused to give an inch. The series came down to game 7 where NOS finally emerged victorious. SJK eSports managed to shut down the offense of Northern Ascendancy while Written In The Stars charged at Dynasty like hungry rhinos and ended up sweeping the series. The final four ended up being Aapon Taikasauva, Northern Stars, SJK eSports and Written In The Stars. Sadly the series between SJK and Written had to be decided by walkovers due to rule violations, which meant SJK advanced to the finals. As for the playoff run of championship team Aapon Taikasauva, I'll let goaltender @Casper take it away: Thank you indeed. For next season, Elite will be joined by Pro promotees Evolution (champions), Unlucky Boys HC, Falun Coal Miners and Pata Hellalla. For NHLGamer.com, @The_Alpha_Furyan

Dear NHLGamers, Our website has always been run with quite a small staff compared to the amount of tasks and especially during the last few months and the last ECL, it has been run with 2-3 active people. You may have noticed this as a delay in replies or game report fixes and a lack of the in-depth content that we love to produce for you. On the other side of the table, running such an intensive league with almost 100 teams, plus successfully introducing the RCL and running two big versus tournaments including both online and and live-events, things have taken their toll. This also significantly ties up our hands in actually developing new features, as our hands are tied with tasks that weren't intended to eat away from the development. In order for us to ensure a successful ECL 6 and other exciting things in the future, we are hereby asking our community for help in the form of (but not limited to) the following positions: ECL ELITE LEAD You are in charge of running the daily operations of ECL Elite together with your two assistants. This means making sure games are played on time, reported on time and correctly, fixing possible errors and communicating with the teams to resolve easy conflicts or escalating to the League Administration where necessary. The ECL Elite Assistants report to you. ECL ELITE ASSISTANT (x2) You are proactively helping out with the the everyday tasks of ECL Elite. This means making sure games are played on time, reported on time and correctly, fixing possible errors and communicating with the teams to resolve easy conflicts or escalating to the League Administration where necessary. You report to the ECL Elite Lead. ECL PRO LEAD You are in charge of running the daily operations of ECL Pro together with your two assistants. This means making sure games are played on time, reported on time and correctly, fixing possible errors and communicating with the teams to resolve easy conflicts or escalating to the League Administration where necessary. The ECL Pro Assistants report to you. ECL PRO ASSISTANT (x2) You are proactively helping out with the the everyday tasks of ECL Pro. This means making sure games are played on time, reported on time and correctly, fixing possible errors and communicating with the teams to resolve easy conflicts or escalating to the League Administration where necessary. You report to the ECL Pro Lead. ECL LITE LEAD You are in charge of running the daily operations of ECL Lite together with your two assistants. This means making sure games are played on time, reported on time and correctly, fixing possible errors and communicating with the teams to resolve easy conflicts or escalating to the League Administration where necessary. The ECL Lite Assistants report to you. ECL LITE ASSISTANT (x2) You are proactively helping out with the the everyday tasks of ECL Lite. This means making sure games are played on time, reported on time and correctly, fixing possible errors and communicating with the teams to resolve easy conflicts or escalating to the League Administration where necessary. You report to the ECL Lite Lead. ECL LEAGUE ADMINISTRATION Sometimes things don't run as smoothly as we want. Sometimes it's one teams fault, sometime both teams and sometimes no one is at fault. Either way, in order to run a fair and well-oiled league we need rules and we need people that are both unbiased and ready to tackle these issues. Being a part of the League Administration demands being open for criticism, working as a team and keeping a cool head. Our goal is for the LA-team to be a team with a good (short) response time and to set a clear standard for how we apply the rules. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF We have previously produced a lot of articles, such as season previews, player interviews, news stories about the ECL and about the NHL-video game itself, who's hot and who's not and so forth. We are looking for someone to pick up the torch and help us create this content at a good quality and frequency. The editor-in-chief is in our case in charge of producing these articles, whether it is through writing it yourself or working with your writing team (work-in-progress) to produce the articles in a timely matter. The material produced will be in English and we expect the the editor-in-chief to excel in the English language, as you are also responsible for editing your writers texts where needed. We can probably tell a lot from your application, but please include any previously written articles you think we might find interesting when sending in your application. JOURNALIST You are responsible for producing content as discussed with the editor-in-chief. You are expected to be able to produce quality articles in English by yourself, but your content doesn't necessarily have to be perfect, as it goes through your editor-in-chief before publication. Please send in any articles you might have written previously as a reference. Feel free to sweep us off our feet with your application, in case you don't have previous journalistic references to send in. STREAMER/BROADCAST CREW Streaming is a larger unit and a big possibility to both showcase our fantastic divisions and their best games and expand our NHLGamer brand. You may have noticed that we've been doing some streams from the the Finnish Championships, the IS Cup and all of the ECL Finals. Our streams have been met with some good viewer counts and our Twitch channel currently stands at 700+ followers. Our goal is to expand on this number, have weekly streams and create more interactivity with the viewers. Thus, we are looking for people interested in being a part of creating weekly ECL broadcasts, ideally covering up to three matchups per week and with play-by-play. The broadcasts would ideally be in English, but if there is a demand for the occasional Finnish or Swedish (these two being two major languages among our community at the moment) stream, we're open to your suggestions regarding that. On top of ECL streams, we'd be happy to have some up-and-coming NHLGamers (or legends) streaming for example HUT, VS or EASHL drop-in games. If streaming is your thing and you want to pitch an idea to us - whether it resonates with the above descriptions or not - feel free to get in touch. To sum it up, we're looking for a group of people to work as a team on this and the exact structure will be determined based on the applicants. VIDEO EDITOR/CREATOR There's a great amount of talented players and goalies in the league and we've seen a few cool team montages in the past. We want more of this! We also want to support this on a divisional and league level, to create things such as the TOP 5 plays of the week or similar. It's all up to the community supplying us with clips. Assuming streaming continues growing as much as it has recently, there should be no shortage of material to work with. That being said, the teams working together with the video editor is a must for creating quality content efficiently, as we can't expect a person to go through 100 teams streams to find the gems. (Not that we're saying there can't be more than one video editor.) We also realize not everyone likes to read walls of text these days (even if it's quality text), so we're also interested in creating more video content around the league to mirror some of the written content and also broaden the spectrum of our content. As a video editor/creator you know a thing or two about image and audio quality and cutting together a video using tools such as Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro X. You don't have to be a professional, but please send us some of your previous work to showcase your talent. PROGRAMMER We're happy to say we've found some help in this department and are excited to get started with a new team member. That being said, the resources are still scarce, so we are interested to hear if there are some fellow programmers out there that have the knowledge and desire to develop for us. You will want to know your way around HTML5, PHP and MySQLi, but we're interested to hear about other skills too. Please send us some of your previous work so we can check it out. SOCIAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVE We currently operate on Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube and Instagram and with the shortage in man hours we've barely been able to cover Facebook and Twitter and those could benefit from some more activity too. If you feel you know how social media works and feel like you could contribute in this department, get in touch. Even if you don't want to be in charge of our social media, you can help. How? Be sure to like and share our social media posts that you enjoy. FORUM MODERATOR In order to make sure our forum is a friendly place for young and old, new to the community or veteran, we want to put some more hands on deck for the moderation team. A good written understanding of English, tactfulness and lurking around the forums are good features for this role. Please note: There have been a handful of people who have previously voiced their interest to help. If you're one of them, don't worry, we have not ruled you out, we just want to do it through the below process that is open for everyone. Also note that one may apply for more than one role. Please apply by following the below instructions. How to apply Please send a freely formulated private message to me (@Kenu) here at the forums, ideally by Friday the 12th of January. We're always looking for more talent though, so feel free to get in touch also after that. Please include the following: Name Where you're from (for time zone purposes mainly) Which of the above roles you are interested in (you may also suggest something that isn't listed) Describe your qualities (now's your chance to brag!) that may be of value How much time you can approximately allocate to working on NHLGamer and let us know of possible limitations. (We do understand that schedules change, but a rough estimate of availability is helpful.) Anything else you think might be relevant related to your application. The sooner we get the team roster filled up, the sooner - and more effectively - we can get going with ECL 6! Thanks in advance!