Patrik Laine needs to know this. Desperately. He needs to know that before Teemu Selanne, there was Veli-Pekka Ketola – the first player born in Finland to sign with a North American professional hockey team. And Hexi Riihiranta.
And in and around those Finnish-born players, the history of hockey in Winnipeg is a history of multi-vowelled, buy-a-consonant names and surnames ending in ‘sons’ and ‘stroms.’ In fact Laine, chosen second overall by the Winnipeg Jets Friday night, joins a franchise whose roots stretch deep into Scandinavian soil; a city of few pretensions and much ambition that has traditionally been fertile ground for the launching of an NHL career for players from Finland and Sweden.
I know, because I was often there five rows up at the Winnipeg Arena, beside the hallway from which the Lars-Erik Sjobergs and Ulf Nilssons and Anders Hedbergs and Curt Larssons and, yes, Ketolas would skate onto the ice, that old portrait of Queen Elizabeth looking on from above.
I was there in 1976 when the Jets and their Swedish captain and eight other – eight! – Scandinavian players won the first of three AVCO Cup trophies, emblematic of the World Hockey Association championship.
Sorry, NHL snobs: I have never seen a team like that; never seen a line to match Hedberg, Nilsson and Hull – the ‘Hot Line’ as we called them – for power and artistry and blindingly fast sleight of hand. OK, I’ll give you those Edmonton Oilers – but don’t expect anybody from the ‘Peg to acquiesce easily.
This stuff runs deep.
Much will be made of Laine being a worthy replacement for the much-beloved Finnish Flash, Selanne, who still holds the NHL record for goals by a rookie with 76 in 1992-93 and most importantly, never seemed to mind the bitter cold and biting winds and other, ah, acquired tastes that can make life in Winnipeg just a shade more than unbearable.
Selanne, tossing his glove in the air and skeet-shooting with his stick after a goal; Selanne, the 10th pick overall who waited four years before making the move to North America and becoming something of a cult hero in addition to putting up Hall of Fame numbers.
Some time ago, I had a chance to talk to Larry Hillman for some research on a magazine piece that suffered a much-too-early death on the field of time constraints and motivation. Perhaps life can be breathed back into it. In the meantime, one of the topics broached with Hillman – a tough, old, curly-haired bird and master of some of the game’s subliminally dark arts who played 982 games for eight different NHL teams and two different WHA teams, while coaching one of them (the Jets) to their second WHA title – was the reaction to the influx of Europeans and their impact on the teams’ culture.
Hillman remembered how the community embraced the Europeans – the Jets were very much treated as community property in the city – and how the wives of the players were made to feel at home by the families not only of Jets players, but those of two individuals who figured prominently in the European influx: a Winnipeg-based player agent named Don Baizley and a Winnipeg-based orthopedic specialist named Dr. Gerry Wilson.
The Jets, remember, were already marked because they had the Golden Jet and now here they were bringing over foreign players to take away jobs that might have gone to the borderline NHLers who viewed a career in the WHA as being something of a consolation prize for toiling away in the minors.
This was the era of the ‘Broad Street Bullies’ and if you think the Philadelphia Flyers were beasts, holy mother of God: you never got to see the Birmingham Bulls or Cincinnati Stingers or Quebec Nordiques, who on many nights were the Flyers multiplied by two.
These were the Bulls of Glen Sonmor and Gilles (Bad News) Bilodeau and Steve Durbano and Frank Beaton and the Stingers of Paul Stewart. Kim Clackson of the Indianapolis Racers had 351 penalty minutes in 1975-76 before joining the Jets a couple of seasons later; Curt Brackenbury of the Minnesota Fighting Saints had 255 penalty minutes that season… you get the picture.
Even Gordie Howe was known to fire some elbows in the Jets direction, although upon reflection on the day of Howe’s death, Nilsson remarked that Howe was genuinely welcoming and attuned to the new European reality. Things became so bad that Hull staged a much-publicized walkout to protest the violence in his league.
For many of the rest of us, those European players changed our view of ‘toughness’ from being a willingness to drop the gloves to a desire to soldier on through it all; to seek retribution through the saucer-pass or the blow-by at the blue line. To not give in to the bullying ways of the less talented; to let the art win over the brawn.
It’s true that the Jets’ interest was largely economic, or at least logistical in that by tapping into Scandinavia they were unearthing talent in areas that the hidebound NHL was still reluctant to fully commit, but there was something deeper at work, too – something much more personal.
Wilson spent a year on sabbatical in Sweden in the early 1970s and spent much of his time studying, scouting and getting to know Swedish hockey. He was no hobbyist: in fact, the grandfather of Nashville Predators forward Colin Wilson and father of former NHLer Carey Wilson, was a much-ballyhooed junior player who was ticketed to be part of the Montreal Canadiens dynasty until his career was ruined by knee injuries.
Along with Jets scout Bill Robinson and player agent Baizley, who would go on to be one of the game’s most respected player representatives, Wilson served as a conduit between the Jets and Nilsson, Hedberg, Sjoberg and Larsson. Baizley did much of the work in Finland, and when the Jets won their first AVCO Cup Trophy in 1976, Thommie Bergman, Willie Lindstrom and Mats Lindh had joined the aforementioned group.
Sjoberg was captain of that team – the first European-born captain of a North American-based club. It wasn’t until 2008 that the first European-born and trained captain would raise the Stanley Cup – that being Nicklas Lidstrom of the Detroit Red Wings and since then European players have come and gone in Winnipeg just as they have throughout the NHL.
Laine’s career is just getting started, but from this vantage point – from a deeply personal point of view – it sure seems like he’s the right guy at the right time and, most definitely, in the right place. A Finn in the ‘Peg? A perfect fit.
