HC Davos, 30-time Swiss champion and 14-time Spengler Cup winner, is the tournament’s proud host. In the middle of April 2011, the record Swiss champion won its 30th Swiss championship title in the club’s 90-year history.
An Experienced and Well-Balanced Team
In the last decade alone, HC Davos made it to the playoff final seven times. The team’s tremendous experience and the well-balanced mixture of both established and young players are key to its success. Consequently, it wasn’t a single line that made the difference in last season’s championship: Any of the players could have been the game-winning and championship-deciding factor for the legendary club from Davos. In the end, it was Peter Guggisberg who decided the last game of the best-of-seven playoff final series against the Kloten Flyers, the second Swiss club at the Spengler Cup this year. The player from Bern got to celebrate his fourth championship title with Davos, and thousands of fans poured into the club’s home stadium, the Vaillant Arena, to share this very special day. The atmosphere was extraordinary and the crowd’s euphoria reached new dimensions: With a total of 30 championship wins, HC Davos is by far the most successful Swiss hockey team ever, and 5 national titles since 2002 make it the most successful club of the decade.
Coach Del Curto’s 16th Season
Coach Arno Del Curto, who won his 6th title with the club last season, has been on the bench for a long time and is in his 16th season with HC Davos. Consistency and harmony among his team members are very important to Del Curto, and some of his players have been working with him for several years. Reto and Jan von Arx as well as Sandro Rizzi have been with the club just as long as Del Curto. Josef Marha and Beat Forster already were on the team in 2002, when HC Davos won its first title after a dry spell of 16 years. As several players have been injured and out of the action, many young players from the junior teams got a chance to play for the first team during the first half of this season. They were integrated into the team very well and have shown some great performances on the ice.
Winning the Swiss championship is also HC Davos’s goal this time round and the club is currently still ranked among the top teams in the Swiss championship table. A very special bonus - apart from a successful championship season - would be the first Spengler Cup victory since 2006.
“If we don’t have too many injured players, we’ll also be a favorite for the tournament win,” says HC Davos coach Arno Del Curto. There’ll again be some novice players on the ice for the Davos side: 17-year-old Lukas Sieber and very likely two further young players from the HC Davos junior teams will have their debut (Raphael Kuonen, Fadri Holinger, Lukas Willi or Anton Ranov).
In December, Arno Del Curto was awarded a very special honor when he was elected Switzerland’s coach of the year in the Swiss Sports Awards. Last season, Del Curto and HC Davos won the 5th Swiss championship title together, and journalists and athletes elected the HC Davos coach as Switzerland’s best coach (26.4% of all votes). Del Curto beat Pierluigi Tami (Switzerland’s under-21 soccer national coach, 18.1%) and Martin Rufener (Ski, 13.1%). This is the second time that Del Curto has been elected Switzerland’s coach of the year after 2007. The only one to achieve this before him was former Swiss soccer national team coach Köbi Kuhn.
