Malmo Up and Down Start, but Rave and Stone On A Roll

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Although the Malmo Nighthawks find themselves very comfortably in a playoff position as we start to approach the halfway point of S96, they are not in their familiar perch near the top of the EU. Instead, the Moscow Menace have been running away with the league, with an incredible 29-1-2 record through their first 32 games. Malmo, for their part, sit 19-8-3 through 30 games - good for fourth place and 19 points back of Moscow, but also 23 points ahead of fifth-place Warsaw.

 

From a team point of view, the Nighthawks might welcome the opportunity to play in the wildcard round of the playoffs, given how things have gone when they’ve avoided it the past several seasons. That said, there’s a lot of hockey left to play this season and while it will be close to impossible for anyone to track down Moscow, there will be plenty of jockeying for position among Riga, Davos, and Malmo in the second half.

 

The Nighthawks do top the individual leaderboards, however, with defenseman Jacob Stone the league’s highest-scoring defenseman with 45 points through 30 games. Stone is also eighth in the league with 80 blocked shots and has 80 hits as well.

 

Up front, it has been a fantastic start to the season for Phillip Rave, who leads the VHL with 24 goals and has been atop the league points race for most of the season. Now two games behind several VHL teams, Rave has dropped to fifth in the scoring race with 48 points in 30 games, but he’s only four points behind the leader and every player ahead of him has 32 games played.