Naisten Liiga (lit.'Women's League'), also called the Naisten SM-liiga (NSML) and Jääkiekon naisten SM-liiga (lit.'Ice Hockey Women's Finnish Championship League'), is the elite league for women's ice hockey in Finland. Founded by the Finnish Ice Hockey Association as the Naisten SM-sarja (lit.'Women's Finnish Championship series') in 1982, it was so known until being rebranded as the Naisten Liiga in 2017.[2][3] The league comprises approximately 250 players across ten teams.
Kiekko-Espoo (previously 'Espoo Blues' and 'Espoo United') has dominated Naisten Liiga in the 21st century, winning sixteen Finnish Championships during the span of 1999 to 2022.[4]Tampereen Ilves is the second most successful club, with ten championship titles, and are the only organization to have iced a team in every season since the league's inception.
A majority of teams in Naisten Liiga share their names with men's professional teams in the Liiga or Mestis – HIFK, HPK, Ilves, KalPa, Kiekko-Espoo, Kärpät, Lukko, RoKi, TPS – but the women's teams have historically received few resources and limited promotion from the affiliated men's clubs.[5] In recent years progress has been made in building better relationships between the men's and women's teams; most men's clubs now provide some support to their women's counterparts by advertising games together or helping secure sponsorships.[6][7]
Format
Season format
The Finnish Ice Hockey Association has altered the season format of the Naisten Liiga several times over the league's history. The system currently in use was introduced for the 2022–23 season.[8] It added six games per team to the regular season schedule and matched the season structure of the league's closest neighbor, the Swedish Women's Hockey League (SDHL). The new format replaced the previous twenty-game preliminary series and ten-game divisional series structure, which was first introduced in the 2018–19 season and refined prior to the 2019–20 season.[9]
Regular season
The regular season is a quadruple round-robin tournament, with each team playing every other team four times – generally speaking, each team plays every other team twice at home and twice away, though there are some small variations – resulting in a 36-game season per team. Teams are ranked by points, with three points awarded for a win in regulation time, two points for an overtime win, one point for an overtime loss, and no points awarded for a regulation loss. Individual player statistics from the regular season determine the winner of the Marianne Ihalainen Award, for most points, and the Tiia Reima Award, for most goals scored.
The top eight teams at the end of the regular season qualify for the Naisten Liiga playoffs.
Playoffs
The three rounds of the Naisten Liiga playoffs (Finnish: Naisten Liiga pudotuspelit) are played as a best-of-five tournament, with the exception of the single-elimination game for the Finnish Championship bronze medal. In the quarterfinals, the initial round, teams are paired by seeding from the regular season, with the first seed facing the eighth seed, the second seed facing the seventh seed, and so on.
The champions of the Naisten Liiga playoffs receive the Aurora Borealis Cup as league champions and gold medals as Finnish Champions in women's ice hockey. Selected by the Finnish Ice Hockey Association, the MVP of the playoffs is awarded the Karoliina Rantamäki Trophy.
Qualification
The teams finishing the season ranked ninth and tenth play a promotion/relegation series (Finnish: karsintasarja, lit. 'qualifying series') against the top two teams of the Naisten Mestis regular season.[8] The two teams that finish the series with the most points qualify for the following Naisten Liiga season and the two lower ranked teams are relegated to or remain in the Naisten Mestis for the following season.
A regulation game is sixty minutes in length, played over three 20-minute periods. In the event of a tie at the end of regulation time the winner is decided by a five-minute-length, three-skaters-per-side overtime period. If the game remains tied after the overtime period, the teams proceed to a shootout, in which each team designates three skaters to take penalty shots, one at a time, against the opposing goaltender. Teams alternate shots and each team takes one shot per round. The winner is the team with more goals after three rounds or the team that amasses an unreachable advantage before the third round. If the shootout is tied after three rounds, tie-breaker rounds are played one at a time until there is a winner.
^The 2019–20 Naisten Liiga post-season was cancelled by the Finnish Ice Hockey Association on 12 March 2020, citing public health concerns regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. The Aurora Borealis Cup Finnish Championship finals between Kiekko-Espoo and KalPa and the Finnish Championship bronze medal games between Team Kuortane and Kärpät were scheduled to begin on 14 March 2020. With the cancellation of the season, neither the Aurora Borealis Cup nor any Finnish Championship medals were awarded for the 2019–20 season.[15]
^Salmela, Sari; Pelkonen, Johanna (2008). "SM-sarjan historiaa vuosilta 1982 - 2008" [History of the SM-sarja from 1982 to 2008]. leijonat.fi (in Finnish). Archived from the original on 6 September 2008. Retrieved 6 July 2019.
2023–24 Naisten Liiga season
Finland
