Shawn Hunwick to Europe

I know the main goal is always to land on the NHL, but think about how exciting it would be to play in and around Europe while you're still young.



Congrats, Hunny

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_Red_Bull_Salzburg

Looks like they're a pretty good team, too - they've won their league a number of times in recent years.

Edit: Austrian Hockey has the most facinating season/playoff structure.  The twelve teams play every other team, once at home and once on the road.  At the end of this, they have the Placement Round for the top six teams, where they do the same thing (the Qualifying Round), in order to determine playoff seeding.  Meanwhile, the bottom six teams also do this, and the top two get to go on to the playoffs, the rest drop out.

Here's where it gets really interesting - the #1 team from the Placement Round gets to *take their choice* of which of the bottom four teams (bottom two from the Placement Round and the two from the Qualifying Round) they wish to face.  The #2 team then gets to pick from the remaining three teams, and so on.  After that, they proceed to a best-of-seven format.

(For the information, check out "Infos zur Season" at the bottom of this page: http://www.redbull.com/cs/Satellite/de_AT/EC-Red-Bull-Salzburg---Season-... )

Edit edit: Marty Turco played for this team briefly as well.  Wonder if he put in a good word for Hunwick?

Austria's a beautiful, stable country.  Not a bad place to go play hockey for a year or so.

Besides, with the potential for an NHL lockout, it's good to see that Shawn found a place before everyone else starts trying to go overseas.