With geopolitical manoeuvres meaning that tariffs and trade barriers are coming back in vogue, despite the advice of any coherent economist, has that had an impact on imports here in the AIHL? Local production versus import production has long been a discussion point for fans of the league, so how big an impact are they having in 2025? Does your team rely on imports or locals to get the job done?
Share of scoring
Across the whole AIHL, imports have scored 46.1% of goals, and points (which is a nice symmetry), a little higher share than last year they had 44.4% of goals and 44.7% of points.
The team with the biggest reliance on imports is the Brisbane Lightning – and by a fair margin. With 69 per cent of points coming from imports, they are 13.6 percentage points more reliant than the next-highest team – the Scott Timmins led Mustangs. The Lightning reliance gets even stronger when we look at goals – a full 78.3 per cent of goals coming from their import contingent, miles ahead of the Mustangs again in second place with 51.0 per cent.
At the other end of the spectrum, imports score only 22.4 per cent of Central Coast Rhinos goals, and only 37 per cent of Adrenaline points.
Looking at examples of particular players contributions being critical to their success, Tanner Hopps from the Brisbane Lightning has a point on 56.5% of Lightning goals – the only player currently contributing to over half of his team’s goals. There is one caveat to that though – Scott Timmins. Before his recent injury caused him to miss the last five Mustangs games, he had a point on 54.7% of Mustangs goals. In the three games he’s missed, the Mustangs are also 1-4 (thanks to a Brody Lindal game-winner with 11 seconds left), so he leaves a huge hole.
Production
With the share of points scored by imports or locals one thing, the other is how much production teams get from their imports – that is, how big a mark do they leave? No surprise, the Melbourne Ice get the highest point-per-game production from their imports with David Booth’s four-and-a-half points per game driving the overall Ice import production to 2.318, ahead of the Evgenii Skachkov-led Newcastle Northstars with 2.200.
Again, we can see some of the struggles for the Rhinos and Adrenaline, who are just not getting the output from their imports. Overall, Rhinos imports are under a point per game, and the Adrenaline are just above it – that low level of scoring goes a long way towards those two teams occupying the bottom of the ladder.
If we look at scoring production from blueliners – two things stand out. Firstly, import D-men averaging just under a point per game is impressive. Secondly, two import defencemen are scoring at over 1.6 points per game and driving their teams forward – Newcastle’s Karel Kubat and the Mustangs’ Ty Wishart.
Goaltending
Something very unusual is happening in 2025 – Local goalies are outperforming import goalies overall (on both save percentage and goals-against-average). This is the first time I’ve seen in the data since 2013 where this has been the case (see Clickin’ Tenders). This is on the back of strong local performances from Anthony Kimlin (shocker, I know), Aleksi Toivonen and the twin pairing of Jake Doornbos and Matus Trnka in Brisbane, who are leading the way.
Whether an import tender is actually worth their slot though, depends on the local goalie available, amongst various other things. We even looked at this one a while ago. Having watched the Rhinos lately – their prospects without Anand Oberoi are terrifying to consider.
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