Pelicans Lahti

The name that Lahti's hockey club carries today only exists because the old one had become toxic. When Hockey Reipas went bankrupt, the people running the game in the city didn't just look for fresh backing — they dropped the Reipas name altogether and rebuilt around a new identity, Pelicans, for the 1996–97 season. The team they buried had itself gone through a string of names since arriving in Lahti — Lahden Reipas, Kiekkoreipas, Hockey Reipas — but its lineage runs back further still, to Viipurin Reipas, formed in Vyborg in 1891 and champions of the very first Finnish title in 1928. None of that history travelled with the new badge.

What Pelicans have built since carries an odd shape: three trips to the Liiga final, and three defeats, all by an identical 4–1 scoreline — against JYP Jyväskylä in 2011–12, then twice against Tappara Tampere, in 2022–23 and again the following season. Pasi Nurminen, a goalkeeper who went on to co-own the club alongside Formula One driver Valtteri Bottas, is one of several Pelicans products who went on to NHL careers, a list that also includes Antti Niemi and Leo Komarov.

Home games are played in front of just over 5,500 people at Isku Areena. The retired numbers hanging in the arena — Hannu Koskinen's 11, Erkki Laine's 13, Kari Eloranta's 17 — belong to a club that, for all its finals, has never once lifted the Kanada-malja.