CHL Finalists Karpat Oulu are off to another strong start in the CHL with a 4-2 win in Ostrava over Vitkovice. Read more in Gamecentre.

Karpat start off the new CHL season with a win, but Vitkovice gave them a good battle on their home ice. Jesse Saarinen scored the first goal of the CHL season and added an assist in the second, while Cramo Top Scorer Mika Pyorala also had a goal and an assist for the victors. In goal, newly re-acquired Jussi Rynnas stopped 29 of 31 shots, while Patrik Bartosak stopped 18 of 21 at the other end. Rostislav Olesz got Vitkovice on the board early in the second period and then assisted on Karol Sloboda's goal with 1:37 remaining to bring Vitkovice within one, but a buzzer-beating empty-netter from Toni Kahkonen finished them off.

"It’s big victory for us," Karpat coach Kai Suikkanen said afterward. "Karpat had a lot of changes before this season. A lot of players left, we have many new players. We only played two games before the CHL started. I was wondering what would happen. I’ve seen their results against Linkoping and Slovan Bratislava – Vitkovice are very good team. We are very happy about those three points. The first period was good – all lines were working together. In the second period we were a bit passive, we didn’t work so much. But then we scored a couple goals. We knew that they would try to tie it in the last period, but we managed to keep our victory."

"We allowed them to score three goals from the area in front of our net," Vitkovice head coach Jakub Petr admitted. "Our opponents showed a high level of skill but we checked them poorly and we simply can’t afford such mistakes. We can be satisfied with the first half of the second period and maybe with the third one, when we were fearless and we created a few chances, but Karpat proved to be the better team and took a deserved win. A crucial moment was the two quick goals in the second period. The Finnish players are known to be strong physically and that’s what decided it, because we had enough players there. There was a forward scoring on a rebound in between two other players and then another goal right after a face-off. These are individual mistakes. I’m glad we didn’t give up and played good hockey in the last period, we even scored a goal but we didn’t have enough time to tie it."