Dresdner Eislowen

Steven Rupprich played 322 games in the DEL2 for Dresden between 2014 and 2021, more than anyone else who has pulled on the shirt. The club he played for traces back to April 1990, when it was founded as Eissportclub Dresden; the senior team was later split off into its own company and took the Eislöwen name in 2000. Dark blue and white have stayed the colours since.

Silverware has been thin: two Oberliga titles, in 2005 and 2008, and then a long wait. That wait ended in 2025, when Dresden won the DEL2 championship and went up to the DEL for the first time. The stay lasted one season — they finished 14th and came back down. Petr Sikora's number 22 hangs retired from that spell in between, a reminder of the 363 points he put up in 264 games, still the club record.

None of it has come with a cup run to match. The best the Eislöwen have managed in the DEB-Pokal is the semi-final, in 2005–06 and again in 2010–11, and no further. What has held is the local rivalry: home games against the Lausitzer Füchse and Eispiraten Crimmitschau are billed as the Sachsen-Derby, and the league table goes out of the window on those nights.

Bohuslav Šubr took over as head coach and now has to get Dresden back up from the DEL2, a division the team knows well after Jordan Knackstedt was named its Player of the Year in 2022 while wearing the captain's armband. It is a shirt Steven Rupprich once wore more often than anyone else.