2015–16 Champions Hockey League
| Tournament details | |
|---|---|
| Dates | 20 August 2015 – 9 February 2016 |
| Teams | 48 |
|
← 2014–15 2016–17 → | |
The 2015–16 Champions Hockey League is the second season of the Champions Hockey League, a European ice hockey tournament launched by 26 founding clubs, six leagues and the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF).
Team allocation
A total of 48 teams from twelve different European first-tier leagues will participate in the 2015–16 Champions Hockey League.
Team license
The teams will be decided with regards to different licenses for the founding teams, leagues and wildcards.
- A license: The 26 founding teams will get an A license, if they play in the first-tier league of their respective domestic league system in the 2015–16 season.
- B license: Two teams – the regular-season winner and the play-off champion in the 2014–15 season – from each of the founding leagues (the Austrian EBEL, the Czech Extraliga, the Finnish Liiga, the German DEL, the Swedish SHL and the Swiss NLA) received a B licence to the tournament. If those teams had already received an A license, other teams from the league took the B license spots. The order the B licenses were handed out is:[1][2]
- National champion
- Regular season winner
- Runner-up, regular season
- Play-off finalist
- Best placed semifinal loser
- Worst placed semifinal loser
- C license: There will be 10 wild cards. The champions from Norway, Denmark, Slovakia, France and the United Kingdom will, like the previous season get wild cards.[3] From Slovakia, Denmark, Norway and the United Kingdom, a second team will also get a wild card.[4] One wild card license will be assigned to the IIHF Continental Cup 2015 winner HK Neman Grodno.[5][6][7]
Teams
Round and draw dates
The preliminary schedule of the competition is as follows.[9] Each team will play 2 games at home and 2 games away.
| Phase | Round | Draw date | First leg | Second leg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group stage | Matchday 1 | 13 May 2015[10] | 20–21 August 2015 | |
| Matchday 2 | 22–23 August 2015 | |||
| Matchday 3 | 27–28 August 2015 | |||
| Matchday 4 | 29–30 August 2015 | |||
| Matchday 5 | 3–4 September 2015 | |||
| Matchday 6 | 5–6 September 2015 | |||
| Playoff | 16th-finals | TBA | 22 September 2015 | 6 October 2015 |
| Eighth-finals | 3 November 2015 | 10 November 2015 | ||
| Quarter-finals | 1 December 2015 | 8 December 2015 | ||
| Semi-finals | 12 January 2016 | 19 January 2016 | ||
| Final | 9 February 2016 | |||
Group stage
Blue: A-license; Red: B-license; 
Yellow: C-license.For the 2015–16 season, the regular season will be expanded to 48 teams, divided into 16 groups with 3 teams in each group. The two first teams in each group will advance to the play-off round of 32.[5] The draw for the Group Stage will take place on 13 May 2015 in Prague during the 2015 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship.
Playoffs
In the playoffs, the teams will play against each other over two legs on a home-and-away basis with the team with the better standing after the group stage having the second game at home, except for the one-match final played at the venue of the team with the best competition track record leading up to the final.[11][12][13]
References
- ↑ "New clubs join CHL". iihf.com. 4 April 2014. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- ↑ "Qualifikationskriterien für die Champions Hockey League". iihf.com (in German). 20 February 2014. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- ↑ "Norge får to plasser i Champions Hockey League" (in Norwegian). TV2. 10 February 2015. Retrieved 16 February 2015.
- ↑ "V Lige majstrov bude mať Slovensko od sezóny 2015/2016 dvoch zástupcov" (in Slovakian). Slovak Ice Hockey Federation. 13 February 2015. Retrieved 16 February 2015.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "CHL to play with 48 teams in 2015–16". Champions Hockey League. 4 December 2014. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
- ↑ "Neman wins Continental Cup". IIHF. 10 January 2015. Retrieved 10 January 2015.
- ↑ "HC Neman Grodno to play in 2015-16 CHL season". Belarus News (BelTA). 5 February 2015. Retrieved 16 February 2015.
- ↑ Mankila, Pekka (29 March 2015). "Kärpät march to Liiga semis, SaiPa replaced by Blues in CHL". Champions Hockey League. Retrieved 29 March 2015.
- ↑ "Deltagelse i Champions Hockey League 2015/16". Norges Ishockeyforbund. Retrieved 18 February 2015.
- ↑ "Belarus’ Neman Grodno marks CHL foray into Eastern Europe". CHL. Retrieved 19 February 2015.
- ↑ "New era dawns for Europe". iihf.com. 12 December 2013. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- ↑ Jakobsson, Simon (20 December 2013). "CHL-formatet är spikat". Norrbottens-Kuriren (in Swedish). Retrieved 30 December 2013.
- ↑ "The CHL playing format". championshockeyleague.net. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
| ||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||