Klagenfurt II

A teenager laces up for KAC's second team in the Alps Hockey League, plays out his development minutes in front of a few hundred people at the Heidi Horten Arena, and three years later gets picked in the first round of the NHL draft by the Detroit Red Wings.

EC KAC II was set up in 2016 as a distinct competitive side under the Klagenfurt club, entering the newly formed multi-national Alps Hockey League that same season. Before that, from around 2010/11, the squad had already been playing in Austria's lower divisions, Austria2 and Austria3, without collecting a title there.

Results in the AlpsHL have stayed modest by design: the club's best finish was fourth place in the regular season of 2023/24, and it has never reached the playoffs. Silverware was never really the point — the point is what happens to the players who pass through. Besides Kasper, Gregor Biber moved on to the Utah Mammoth organisation in the AHL, and Lukas Haudum went further still, to TPS in Finland's Liiga, while Thimo Nickl and Clemens Unterweger simply graduated upstairs to the KAC first team.

The senior club carries Klagenfurt's oldest hockey rivalry, the Kärntner Derby against EC VSV, but that fixture belongs to a different level entirely — EC KAC II plays its hockey in the AlpsHL, a division VSV's reserves do not contest, so the derby stays a first-team affair and never reaches the second.