Landshut

Landshut sits in Lower Bavaria, a Gothic-brick city on the Isar better known for its dukes and its beer festival than for winter sport, yet ice hockey has drawn a following there since 1948. What they built kept the name EV Landshut through the years that mattered most: two German championships, in 1970 and 1983, and a national cup in 1969.

Erich Kühnhackl ran through most of that era, from 1968 into the mid-1980s and again at the end of the decade, and all four of the club's championship seasons carry his name. Landshut took a founding place in the DEL when the league formed in 1994, then lost its licence in 1999 and dropped down the divisions. To manage the debts that followed, the team was spun off into a limited company in 2002 and played for over a decade as the Cannibals, a nickname that stuck to the shirt long after the finances were sorted and the club returned to its old name in 2013. Two Oberliga titles, in 2002 and 2019, mark the club's later life in the lower tiers, played out in front of 4,448 seats at the VR-Bank Landshut Arena.

None of that history means as much on derby night as the games against ESV Kaufbeuren, a fixture the region simply calls "Derby," or the meetings with Starbulls Rosenheim and Eisbären Regensburg, which carve up Bavaria into Niederbayern against Oberbayern and east against east again. Against Kaufbeuren especially, the league table tends to go out of the window.