Tohoku Free Blades

Three Asia League titles arrived inside four seasons for the Free Blades, and the first of them did not come the way anyone in Hachinohe would have wanted. The 2010–11 championship was decided without a final: the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami cancelled the closing series, and the league named Tohoku co-champions alongside Anyang Halla. Two years later the club settled the argument on the ice, beating the East Hokkaido Cranes for the 2012–13 crown, and in 2014–15 it went further still, sweeping Anyang Halla 3–0 to close out the title without a game lost. A domestic first followed in 2018, when the Free Blades added the All-Japan Ice Hockey Championship to the collection.

Chris Wakabayashi has coached the team through nearly all of that run, stepping aside only for the 2014–15 season, when J.P. MacCallum took interim charge and steered the club to its sweep of Anyang Halla before Wakabayashi returned. Go Tanaka has worn the captaincy since 2010–11, present for every one of the league titles.

Games against the Oji Eagles and Red Eagles Hokkaido carry no official rivalry tag, just the familiarity of two sides that keep meeting when the table matters. Home games are played in front of 1,576 seats at the Niida Indoor Rink, a small enough building that a title celebration fills it.

None of it was on the cards when the club was put together in Hachinohe in 2008, a year before it played its first Asia League Ice Hockey season in 2009–10.