In their third game in just four days, the Red Jackets will be playing away again on Tuesday evening. They will be visiting the league’s strongest offensive team in Ljubljana, where they recently won three times in a row across all seasons.
The EC-KAC (22 wins, nine defeats), which has been badly hit by injuries and illnesses, will play its 72nd and final competition game in the calendar year that is coming to an end on Tuesday, December 30, 2025. The league leader from Klagenfurt is visiting the current third-place team in the win2day ICE Hockey League, Olimpija Ljubljana (20 wins, twelve defeats), in Slovenia’s capital. The game starts at 7:15 p.m., Sporturope.TV (opens in new window) will broadcast live.
REPORTING
This match cannot be seen on free TV, but a live stream broadcast, produced by the host club, will be offered again on Sporteurope.TV (Opens in new window), with the broadcast starting at 7 p.m. A discounted “12-Months Pass” (priced at €19.90 instead of €24.90 per month) is available from the streaming partner of the win2day ICE Hockey League as part of a Christmas promotion (running until December 31st) (Opens in new window). Radio Kärnten (available online via sound.orf.at(Opens in new window)) accompanies the game in the Kärntner Eishockeymagazin, which starts at 8:04 p.m.
The initial situation:
The EC-KAC extended its winning streak at the weekend with two wins within just 27 hours, both at home against EC VSV on Saturday (5:2) and away at the Vienna Capitals on Sunday (3:1), the Klagenfurt team scored the full three points. With a total of 67 points – an average of 2.16 per season game – the Red Jackets lead the table in both absolute and relative terms. They have now gained a whopping cushion of 25 points in seventh place and are therefore well on their way to qualifying for the quarter-finals early for the ninth time in ten years (i.e. without a detour via the pre-playoffs or qualifying round). The key to the current red-white success is team balance; since Sunday, 23 of the 24 field players who have received ice time over the course of the season have collected scorer points. In Ljubljana, the EC-KAC also defended a quite impressive away series: the last five encounters on foreign ice were all won in regular time (and with a total of 20:5 goals). The Red Jackets have often been successful in the last game of the calendar year in the recent past: in six of the last seven seasons, the record champions scored points on December 30th, only coming away empty-handed in a 1-0 home defeat against Linz in 2022.
Olimpija Ljubljana ended its longest losing streak of the season so far on Sunday with a clear and dominant 5-0 home win against Fehérvár AV19. Before that, the Slovenians had remained without a point around Christmas against HC Pustertal as well as against Pioneers Vorarlberg and HCB Südtirol. The Green Dragons are currently in third place in the win2day ICE Hockey League, but in the more meaningful ranking based on average points they are only in sixth place. Olimpija’s average of 3.78 goals scored from play per game this season is still the highest in the league, but the trend is clearly declining: in the eight December games, Ljubljana scored a whopping 37.0 percent fewer goals than in the 24 games in the first three months of the season. A very similar development can also be seen in the power play, where at 27.2 percent the success rate is clearly the highest among the 13 ICE teams, but since the away win in Graz on December 17th, none of the last 14 powerplay opportunities could be used. The Green-Whites’ home record is impressive, having scored points in 13 of their 16 games at Hala Tivoli so far.
The story:
Klagenfurt and Ljubljana share a great tradition when it comes to ice hockey; in February 1932, the Red Jackets were the opponents of the then HK Ilirija in the first competitive game ever played in Slovenia’s capital. Over the decades, the EC-KAC then dueled with Olimpija Ljubljana in various competitions, and from 1995 to 2000 (Alpine League and IEL) and 2007 to 2016 (EBEL) they were finally active in joint leagues. Today’s Green Dragons – operating under the same name, but formally and legally a different organization – have been part of the win2day ICE Hockey League since 2021, and since then there have been 18 direct encounters with Austria’s record champions. The Carinthians won 13 of these duels and scored points in 16 of the confrontations. Since February 15, 2022, the Red Jackets have scored at least one point in each of the 14 games played against Olimpija. In the Hala Tivoli, the EC-KAC recently celebrated three away wins in a row across all seasons and scored an impressive 18 goals in total.
The last duel also took place in the traditional ice rink at Celovška cesta, where Klagenfurt won 5-2 on November 16th. Ljubljana was initially able to equalize two of the guests’ leads on the power play, but thanks to three unanswered goals in the second half of the game, the Red Jackets took all three points. The key to the red-white success was, on the one hand, the power play, in which five opportunities were converted into three goals, and, on the other hand, the stable defensive game in the middle section, when the league’s strongest offensive team in terms of goals was able to be minimized to four shots on goal.
Personnel:
The EC-KAC paid dearly for the away win in Vienna on Sunday. With Tobias Sablattnig (symptoms of illness), Maximilian Preiml (lower body injury) and David Waschnig (upper body injury), three players had to end the game early. For the two injured people, examinations on Monday gave the all-clear, as the duration of the loss cannot currently be assessed as long-term. Tobias Sablattnig and Mathias From, who did not travel to the federal capital because he was ill, will be re-evaluated on Tuesday, after which a decision will be made about their possible assignments in Ljubljana. In any case, the long-term injured Jordan Murray, Thomas Hundertpfund and Luka Gomboc will be missing. Further examinations on Jesper Jensen Aabo (lower body injury in training) revealed on Monday that he will have to take a break of several weeks.
kac.at Image: Domen Jancic
“), i.text = “window._taboola = window._taboola || ();_taboola.push({mode:’alternating-thumbnails-a’, container:’taboola-below-article-thumbnails’, placement:’below-article’, target_type: ‘mix’});”, n.appendChild(l), n.appendChild(i), e(n, t) } Array.prototype.filter || (Array.prototype.filter = function(e, t) { if (“function” != typeof e) throw TypeError(); let n = (); for (let l = 0, i = this.length >>> 0; l < i; l += 1) if (l in this) { let r = this(l); e.call(t, r, l, this) && n.push(r) } return n }), window.insertAfter = e, window.getElementByXPath = t, window.injectWidgetByXpath = function e(l) { let i = t(l) ||. document.getElementById("tbdefault"); i && n(i) }, window.injectWidgetByMarker = function e
