When he batted a puck out of midair and into the back of the net in overtime to lift the Senators over the Detroit Red Wings during their November 2023 NHL Global Series game in Sweden, Tim St\u00fctzle set a high bar to clear for his future performances overseas.<\/p>\n
Next December, St\u00fctzle and the Sens will head to Germany, specifically D\u00fcsseldorf \u2014 just east of where he grew up in Viersen \u2014 for two games against the Chicago Blackhawks. St\u00fctzle learned a few days before Friday\u2019s official announcement from the league and couldn\u2019t hold his excitement for too long.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t supposed to tell anyone really, but couldn\u2019t really hold it in,\u201d said a smiling St\u00fctzle after Friday\u2019s practice. \u201cSo I told a bunch of the guys, and obviously very exciting, it\u2019s just like, 20 minutes from where I grew up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2026 edition of the NHL Global Series will mark just the second and third regular season NHL games in the country, after a 2011 game between the Buffalo Sabres and Los Angeles Kings. With a German superstar on the team, Senators president and CEO Cyril Leeder knew the ask would eventually come from the league.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we drafted Tim St\u00fctzle,\u201d joked Leeder on Friday when he was asked when he knew the Senators would be heading to Germany.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou didn\u2019t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out, you\u2019ve got one of the best players from Germany on your team that you\u2019re going to be asked at some point. But it\u2019s been fairly recent with the league, in the last month or two the discussions started on going over for the Global Series this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leeder laid out the business case for the NHL\u2019s focus on Germany, with the nation of 84 million being the third-largest in Europe, the success of stars like St\u00fctzle, Leon Draisaitl, Moritz Seider, and J.J. Peterka in recent years, and strong domestic leagues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no direct benefit for the clubs right now \u2014 we\u2019re not as into the international business model as say, the NFL and the NBA, where the individual teams can do their own marketing deals, do their own partnerships, so from a team perspective this is good for us really because we get to showcase one of our stars in Europe,\u201d said Leeder.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think for us as a small hockey country, it\u2019s just trying to get better every year, keep working on those things, and try to get more kids to play hockey, I think that\u2019s the biggest thing we can do,\u201d said St\u00fctzle about growing the game in Germany.<\/p>\n
\u201cBe role models for them, show up every day, I think that\u2019s going to be great as well. If I was that age, I would have loved to see the NHL over in Germany and I think that\u2019s going to grow the game as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When he batted a puck out of midair and into the back of the net in overtime to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-534411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}