Salzburg 2

Rittner Buam and Vienna Capitals Silver sit across the table from Salzburg's reserve side most often. The team itself grew out of necessity rather than ambition — when the parent club, EC Red Bull Salzburg, moved up into Austria's top flight, someone had to hold the vacated place in the Nationalliga, and that job fell to a newly formed second side.

It won that Nationalliga in its first season, 2003–04, then spent over a decade in a lower tier before the 2016 switch to the Alps Hockey League gave it a proper stage. Under the Red Bull Hockey Juniors name it has taken that league twice, in 2018–19 and again in 2023–24, and topped the regular-season table in 2019–20 before the season was scrapped. Jungbullen is what people still call them, a name that has outlasted the rebrand.

The point of the club was never the silverware but what it produces: Lukas Schreier, Lukas Hörl and Mathias Böhm all moved up through this dressing room to the senior team, and that pipeline is the measure by which Salzburg judges the Juniors more than any final. They play out of the Eisarena Salzburg, a rink that holds barely 3,400, which suits a team whose real business is elsewhere. For now the job stays the same as it was in 2004: win enough at this level to keep proving who is ready for the one above it.