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NHLGamers, We’ve started the NHL 20 season strong but it’s time to ramp up the heat. We’ve been plotting behind the scenes for quite some time now and so, without further ado, we are extremely proud to announce that, in cooperation with the Swedish Hockey League (SHL), Aftonbladet and Area Academy, we will be launching the eSHL starting January 13th, 2020. “This is truly an exciting venture for both us and our clubs as we’ll be expanding our product range while having the opportunity to reach a completely new audience”, says Michael Marchal, CEO of SHL. The official broadcasting partner for the eSHL will be Aftonbladet, the biggest daily newspaper in Sweden with close to 4 million daily readers/viewers. A live studio broadcast will be hosted twice a week by Aftonbladet and all other games will be streamed on the Twitch channels of the respective teams, with the occasional matchup featured in an NHLGamer Twitch broadcast. Aftonbladet will also serve as one of the main news outlets for the eSHL for the duration of the season. The eSHL will act as a virtual counterpart to the current SHL, where teams will play each other in a league format of 6v6 EASHL. The regular season will start on January 13th and end in February. While other major professional hockey leagues around the world have slowly begun turning their eyes towards esports, the eSHL stands out in that it is a sanctioned, organized league played in the 6v6 format - something completely unparalleled in NHL esports up until this point. “The most successful esports worldwide are already team-based, not to mention the strong synergy that exists between real hockey and the EASHL mode where all six players on the ice need to work as a unit in order to win”, says Linus @KAWAIIII Eklund, Project manager at SHL. To Eklund, partnering with NHLGamer for eSHL was the obvious choice: “With their many years of experience hosting leagues within the EA SPORTS NHL series, NHLGamer made for a perfect fit as our league partner as we set out to create the eSHL. I have plenty of experience when it comes to competitive gaming, including the NHL series, and could tell NHLGamer had built things the right way, developing a community and a professional environment within an esport that didn’t really exist a few years ago.“ “Kenneth (Lehtinen - @Kenu ) has been an incredible resource for us when setting up this league and we look forward to working with him and NHLGamer to make this league reach its full potential.” As NHLGamer members have surely noticed, a number of SHL teams like Växjö Lakers, Färjestad BK and Luleå Hockey already announced their EA Sports NHL rosters in recent months - announcements that have all been leading up to this project. As things currently stand, a vast majority of the 14 current SHL clubs will be participating in the eSHL. Rögle BK and HV71 are currently openly recruiting teams and players, others have not spoken out about their situation yet. This is what the list of teams looks like currently: Färjestad BK HV71 IK Oskarshamn Leksands IF Linköping HC Luleå Hockey Malmö Redhawks Rögle BK Skellefteå AIK Växjö Lakers Örebro Hockey All of the league action and standings can be followed at e.shl.se which will be going live in mid-December. Follow eSHL on their social media channels Twitter - eSHLse Instagram - eSHL_se About SHL Svenska Hockeyligan or the Swedish Hockey League is the highest tier of professional hockey in Sweden and also regarded as one of the best European hockey leagues. It was formerly known as Elitserien but renamed in 2013. The league consists of 14 teams who are competing for the Le Mat Trophy. Read SHL’s story in Swedish here

LA Rulings - December 3rd, 2019 Case 1 (Freddy Mercury Institute vs. Rakish): FMI contacted League Administration about Rakish not responding to communication, nor showing up for their games at the default time. FMI contacted Rakish hours ahead and the captain of Rakish later admitted to making a mistake by not staying on top of the schedule. LA has come to the conclusion that Rakish failed to keep their end of what's considered good communication and as such rule 10.8 would be pertinent to this case. LA has thusly decided to award FMI with WO's from both matches. Case 2 (Virtuoso vs. Kesaloma): Late in the second game (less than a minute remaining in the 3rd) between Virtuoso and Kesaloma, there was a disconnect prior to the center ice faceoff taking place after Kesäloma scored and was only one goal behind. Neither team managed to stop play and the game ended with a CPU player on the ice for the last minute. Virtuoso suggested to Kesaloma to play the game from the start because of the disconnect. Kesaloma didn't agree with that and instead asked League Administration for technical defeats, due to Virtuoso having connection issues earlier in the matchup and Kesaloma suspecting an intentional disconnect when they had good momentum in the game and believed they would tie the game up. LA could not confirm that the disconnect would have been intentional and thus could not give out technical defeats and told Kesaloma to either agree to replay the game or the number of seconds that were remaining at the time of the disconnect. At this point, Virtuoso was reluctant to replay the games though and while LA believes they should honor their own suggestion, LA couldn't force Virtuoso to do so as per the current ruleset. As such, when teams can't agree on how to resolve things, rule 11.11 dictates that games should be continued from the point of the disconnect, thusly LA rules that the two teams shall play out the remainder of the game from where it left off. Additionally, we have now amended rule 11.11 with the following: Case 3 (EBR eSports Official vs. Syntax Error): EBR eSports Official contacted the League Administration about Syntax Error not showing up at the agreed time, instead, they showed up one hour late when they finally realized they were due to play. The issue was caused by miscommunication by the Syntax Error captain. LA has come to the conclusion that both teams agreed to play on Friday 29.11 at 20 CET - as such rule 10.8 would be pertinent to this case. LA has thusly decided to award EBR eSports Official with WO's from both matches. Case 4 (Alliance HT): Alliance HT has been using a player with more than one registered NHLGamer account in multiple games this season (namely, Oo_hazzey_oO / AntiHoma). Additionally, the captain (MAYZIIX) was fully aware of this and still continued to use said player. This is in direct violation of rules 2.4 & 6.1, as shown below. After hearing the explanation for the new account, the whole ordeal seems very unnecessary. Reportedly Oo_hazzey_oO played for Nearbird Fighters in the RCL 5 season and didn't want to use the same account to join Alliance HT in ECL 9, so a new account was created for this purpose. To our knowledge, the player has neither played RCL since joining Alliance HT with the second account and also hasn't played ECL with another account. In other words, had the player just used his regular account to join Alliance HT in the first place - there would be no problem here. The aforementioned circumstance, combined with captain MAYZIIX assuming liability for this situation has been taken into account as a mitigating factor when making the decision. After careful consideration, LA has decided to ban Alliance HTs captain MAYZIIX and Oo_hazzey_oO for the rest of the season (ECL 9 & RCL 5), as well as institute a ban on them being the captain of a team until the end of NHL 20. Furthermore, MAYZIIX will be stepping down from the admin role within the RCL. Additionally, any games involving Oo_hazzey_oO / AntiHoma will remain and not be removed from either respective league. Due to this case, however, LA would like to add the following rule in order to cover scenarios like this in the future: “8.3 Void Games” If a game is played where one (or more) of the players involved was deemed to not be legal, then LA reserves the right to potentially void all games played with the said player(s), and award WOs victories to the non-offending team. The rulebook has been updated with the above-mentioned rule amendments. We would like to remind the ECL Pro teams that the transfer deadline is coming up on Thursday, December 5th. Despite this disappointing news, NHLGamer would like to thank MAYZIIX for all of his hard work with the RCL during the years. We are looking for some new staff members for RCL roles. Good communication skills in English and Russian are important. Please contact @Kenu via private message if you're interested.