NHL: Leaner Finnish years are ahead

Finns NHL fans should enjoy it now, while the stardom is still available.

Alexander Barkov skippered the reigning champion team of the series with the captain’s elbow. Mikko Rantanen a hundred-point season is becoming commonplace.

Miro Heiskanen, Sebastian Aho, Roope Hintz and Juuse Saros are the driving forces of their teams. Behind them there are still several Finnish players who worked in big roles in their NHL clubs.

Finally, this generation, which can already be called golden, will get to play together in Leijon in the Four Nations tournament in February.

The brightest stars of Finland’s golden NHL generation are in their prime playing age or close to it precisely during the Four Nations and the 2026 Milan and Cortina Olympics.

The future does not look as bright. The direction is downward. Finland’s player production has stagnated. Among the top ten players at the NHL booking event, the Finn was last booked in 2019, when the New York Rangers picked Kaapo Kako second of the entire occasion.

Next in the summer, it is very likely that no Finnish players will be booked in the first round. This also happened in 2021 and 2023.

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The days of abundance are over. In the ice hockey association and clubs, you have to roll up your sleeves and also know how to work at the rink level, so that NHL stars will continue to emerge from Finland.

If the estimate of the dry booking opportunity for summer 2025 is correct, then in the five-year period, only four first-round bookings have come out of the Finnish junior mill. Alarm bells should be ringing loudly.

For comparison: Between 2021 and 2024, a total of 16 Swedish players were booked in the first round.

The brightest success already surrounds the Finnish junior national teams. In the Under-18 World Championships, Finland won bronze in 2022, but the medal before that is the world championship from 2018.

The Young Lions have also played for a couple of years without medals.

The problems of Finnish player production are already visible in the NHL. The brightest stars keep Finland afloat, but there have been alarmingly few breakthrough young players in recent years, although there is no shortage of entrepreneurs.

According to disturbing and even dull messages, young Finns arriving in North America are weaker than their competitors in the basic skills and physics of the sport. There are, after all, individual glimmers of light. This season is worth watching Brad Lambertin20, and Aatu Rädyn21, excerpts.

Particularly the situation of the Finnish defenders seems worrying. Last season, only nine Finnish teams played more than 30 games in the NHL regular season.

With the head coach of the Lions Antti Pennase it may be difficult to get a group of defenders to the Four Nations if injuries plague the Finnish squad. Only NHL players are allowed to play in the tournament.

The days of abundance are over. In the ice hockey association and clubs, you have to roll up your sleeves and also know how to work at the rink level, so that NHL stars will continue to emerge from Finland.