Frölunda Gothenburg centre Mathis Olimb has been the Cramo Top Scorer of the Champions Hockey League for a while now. With the quarter-finals against IFK Helsinki coming up Tuesday, he’s tied for the scoring lead on 21 points with linemate Andreas Johnsson.

by Efraim Larsson

GOTHENBURG – Frölunda Gothenburg has a streak of seven straight victories in the CHL and after beating Tappara Tampere twice in the eighth-finals (5–1 and 4–2 for a total score of 9–3) they are now drawn to face another Finnish club, IFK Helsinki.

IFK impressed in the group stage with 14 points in six games and faced Swiss club Fribourg-Gottéron in the eighth-finals. They had some difficulties with Fribourg and, after tying the first game in Switzerland 2–2, the series was completely up for grabs heading into the second game game in Helsinki. Fribourg were solid and held a 1–1 score until just three minutes remained, where IFK managed to score a pair of late goals. Now they’re more than ready to face Frölunda.

According to Norwegian centre Mathis Olimb, Frölunda have not scouted the Finnish club that much yet. But he knows that IFK is a high-quality team with a lot of skilled players and Frölunda will spend the last couple of days to study them to get as prepared as possible.

Frölunda scored 35 goals in the group stage of CHL and another nine in the two games against Tappara – that's 44 goals in eight games, 5.5 per game. In the SHL you have an average of 2.73 goals per game. What accounts for the big difference?
I think that the SHL is a tighter league where most of the teams play such solid defence that makes it difficult to score, and I believe most of the teams we’ve faced so far in the CHL don't play that sort of game. The upcoming games in the CHL will be much more difficult, though, and I think we have to work a lot harder to be able to score against IFK.

You’ve had an amazing tournament so far, both individually and as a team. What’s the main reason for your success as a team?
To be honest I don’t have any really good answer on that question, but it feels like we have a pretty straight-forward and quick game plan that makes it difficult for the opponents. 

And how about in the Swedish Hockey League?
I think that we’ve played pretty good all season long, but we’ve had some problems on the power play which I think we’ve managed to step up a bit in the last few games. As for why we aren’t as successful on the PP in the SHL (16.13%, 7th place in the league) as we are in the CHL (39.02%, best in the tournament),  that's probably because the teams in the SHL know us much better and have scouted us a lot more.

Individually, 21 points in eight games ties you for first in the CHL, and 24 points in 25 games ties you for second in the SHL. How would you summarize the season so far and your improvement from past seasons? 
I think the season has started out better than expected in all ways. We got a great start with a lot of chemistry on our line (with Andreas Johnsson and Max Görtz), where together we scored 24 points in the three first games of the group stage. After that it's just continued. Personally, I think I was better offensively last year, but I think I’ve managed to improve my defence this year. Luckily that has made an impact on my point scoring as well.