2008 Victoria Cup
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| Date | October 1, 2008 | |||||||||||||||
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| Arena | PostFinance Arena | |||||||||||||||
| City | Bern, Switzerland | |||||||||||||||
| Attendance | 13,794 (80.5% full) | |||||||||||||||
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The 2008 Victoria Cup was the first edition of the Victoria Cup challenge, played on October 1, 2008, between the 2008 European Champions Cup winners, Metallurg Magnitogorsk, and the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League (NHL), at the PostFinance Arena in Berne, Switzerland. The game was played under IIHF rules. The Rangers won the challenge as they battled from a 3–0 deficit to win the game 4–3.
The match was preceded on September 30, 2008, by an exhibition between host SC Bern and the New York Rangers, meant to commemorate the centennial of the Swiss Ice Hockey Association.
However the additional game, the first ever between a Swiss team and an NHL team, ended up competing with the main event at the box office. With tickets steeply priced, neither game sold out and a number of Swiss fans favored the SC Bern game, which drew a significantly larger audience (16,022) than the actual Victoria Cup game.
The New York Rangers defeated SC Bern in this game 8–1. The Rangers followed the Victoria Cup game with two NHL regular-season games against the Tampa Bay Lightning in Prague, Czech Republic, on October 4 and 5 at the O2 Arena. Both games were won 2–1 by the Rangers.
The goalies in the game were Henrik Lundqvist for the New York Rangers and Andrei Mezin for Metallurg Magnitogorsk.
At 1:28 of the first period, Metallurg's Denis Platonov scored a goal past Lundqvist to give them the lead. With 18:07 gone in the first, with the Rangers' Paul Mara in the box for holding, Vladimir Malenkikh made it 2–0 for Magnitogorsk on the power-play.
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