Coach tough as nails:

“Special teams are not good enough for the league”

Pioneers Vorarlberg head coach Dylan Stanley.

(Bild: GEPA pictures)

Last season, the Pioneers Vorarlberg caused a sensation in the ICE Hockey League. Led by league MVP Steve Owre, the team from Feldkirch stormed through to the playoff quarter-finals, where they were beaten by the KAC after a tough battle. Now Owre is gone and so is the success for the time being. There has only been one win in seven games...

"Right now, our special teams - neither in the power play nor in penalty-killing - are good enough for the ICE League," said head coach Dylan Stanley after his Pioneers Vorarlberg first lost 3:5 at VSV on the road trip in Carinthia and then conceded a 2:5 defeat at the KAC. Significantly, Klagenfurt's last goal was scored 159 seconds before the final buzzer - a short-handed goal.

"We had a lot of close games that we only lost in the final third," says Stanley, who coached the Pioneers to the quarter-final play-off last season. That's right! In the season opener against the Innsbrucker Haien, they were only trailing 1:2 until 13 seconds before the end. In the 4:2 away defeat in Bolzano, his team even led until the 52nd minute and in the 5:6 overtime defeat at home to RB Salzburg, the Pioneers were still two goals ahead with eleven minutes to go. "We urgently need to change that again," says Stanley.

A step backwards from last year
A look at the table - even though the season is still young - is anything but encouraging. With just four points from seven games and a goal difference of 19:31, the team from Feldkirch currently hold the "red lantern". This makes their interim record even worse than two years ago. The Pioneers - then coached by Marc Habscheid - had at least two wins to their name after seven rounds (16:25 goals) and were ninth in the table. At the same point in the season the previous year, they had already achieved four full victories...