St. Louis Blues forward Chris Stewart, along with close friend Wayne Simmonds of the Philadelphia Flyers, have decided to play for a very unique league during the lockout. According to True Hockey's Andy Strickland, the pair will be playing for Eispiraten Crimmitschau GmbH, which is in the Bundesleague, or the second tier of the professional German leagues. Why the second tier? Because the top tier teams have restrictions on how many locked-out NHLers can sign with the team, and that prevented both of them from signing with the same club. Stewart's been training hard this off season to improve on last season's disappointing 15 goal and 15 assist showing. I'm assuming that he'll do a bit better on his German team than he did last year, and in a shorter amount of time to boot.
Basically, we have two NHL power-forwards on a second-tier German minor league team. I wonder how one says "unfair advantage" in Deutsche.