Professional Ice Hockey - International

International

There is no single global championship for professional ice hockey. The most elite North American teams compete for the Stanley Cup as their championship. Created in 1892, the Stanley Cup was originally an amateur trophy. Starting in 1907, professionals were allowed to compete for it. Teams from several leagues played for the Stanley Cup before 1926, since which time the cup's trustees have ceded control of the trophy to the National Hockey League (NHL). The terms of the NHL's control over the trophy extended only so long as the NHL remained the undisputed, most dominant professional hockey league in the world, a distinction that arguably was voided in the 1970s after Russian teams played, and often defeated, NHL teams but has not been formally challenged since that time.

The most elite European clubs have competed in the Europa Cup from 1965 to 1997, the European Hockey League from 1996 to 2000, the IIHF European Champions Cup 2005 to 2008 and the Champions Hockey League in 2008. There has not been a European ice hockey championship played since the Champions Hockey League played its only season. The most successful North American team is the Montreal Canadiens who have won 24 Stanley Cups, the most successful European club is HC CSKA Moscow which has won 20 European Cups.

Teams from North American and Europe do not regularly compete against each other in "friendlies" as do soccer clubs, although efforts to expand intercontinental play have increased since the new 2000 millennium. The opportunities for fans and media to compare levels of play between the continents were especially limited during the Cold War since many of Europe’s best clubs were behind the Iron Curtain. After the success of the Summit Series which featured the Canadian and Soviet national teams, there was a demand for more international hockey at the club level. It has also proved that Soviet hockey was at a comparable level to the NHL. This led to the Super Series which from 1975 to 1991 featured an annual tour of North America by a Soviet hockey club. The first Super Series featured CSKA Moscow against the Montreal Canadiens on New Year’s Eve 1975, in what was described in the press as a de facto world championship. The game ended as a 3-3 draw but was hailed as one the greatest games ever played. The following week CSKA played and lost to the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Philadelphia Flyers in a game infamous for it roughness. Subsequent Super Series produced more close results, but generally favoured the Soviet sides. However, following the fall of communism, many elite players from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries went to the NHL for higher pay. The NHL became de facto the world’s most elite league as the quality of play in European leagues suffered. European leagues have, however, benefited from the frequent labor disputes in the NHL (it has locked out its players three times in an eighteen-year span), picking up players who are barred from NHL play due to lockouts.

Between 2000 and 2003, several NHL teams travelled outside North America to play exhibition games against some Swedish and one Finnish ice hockey teams. This series was known as the NHL Challenge.

In 2008, the former Russian Super League was refounded as the Kontinental Hockey League, expanded into Belarus, Latvia, and Kazakhstan, and encouraged its clubs to aggressively seek talented players (sometimes at the expense of the NHL), prompting the media to speculate about eventual KHL challenge to the NHL dominance of international hockey.

Also in 2008, the new Champions Hockey League was created to provide an elite tournament for the best teams in Europe. The winner of the Champions Hockey League will face an NHL challenger each year in the Victoria Cup providing a regular contest between NHL and European teams since the end of the Super Series in 1991. The Champions League was suspended for the 2009-10 season due to withdrawal of sponsors such as Gazprom.

In 2009, KHL and Gazprom executive Alexander Medvedev proposed merging the KHL into a new pan-European league called United Hockey Europe.

Since 2007, the NHL has operated the NHL Premiere series, which brings a limited number of NHL teams (usually four) to Europe to compete in exhibition games against both each other and local professional teams. The NHL teams have won a large majority of the games against European clubs.