Comment: Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen is the best goalkeeper of the year in the NHL | Sport

There is a new Finnish goalie sensation in the NHL, writes Urheilu’s NHL reporter Tommi Seppälä.

of Buffalo Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, 24, flashed already in the autumn season, but sank down around Christmas. The start to the season was strong, however, and Buffalo’s Finnish promise, for example, ate a great talent alive in the goalkeeper competition Devon Levin with the result that the canuck youth was sent to the farm to raise interest.

In December, Luukkonen played a weaker period and lost six matches in a row, but in the end the side slide was just the calm before the storm.

Since the turn of the year, Luukkonen has been undeniably the best goalkeeper in the entire series. There are thirteen victories, the save percentage is the best in the series, as is the average number of goals conceded. Luukkonen is also number one in zero games.

Luukkonen has played exactly one weak match this year. Against Anaheim, the large goalie’s ski slipped in a way that resulted in four goals conceded out of fourteen shots. Buffalo lost the game.

However, one weak match in twenty games is a winning hand to the greatest extent. Luukkonen’s game exudes enormous confidence and peace right now. Analyzing the game of goaltending is its own art form, but even a habitual puck consumer can pick up the balance and efficiency found in Luukkonen’s game – the extra hustling shines in its absence.

Early on Sunday morning, Luukkonen took a victory over reigning champion Vegas. Carolina and Tampa also fell recently, both quality teams. Behind the victories is the consistent quality of work, which is truly raising Luukkos to a new level in the goalkeeper hierarchy of the world’s toughest league. Since Christmas, more than three goals have been scored behind Luukkonen exactly once. Even three goals have been reached only four times by the opponents.

Luukkonen is getting on the top of the cabinet in the Finnish veskari field as well. Or how many during the season were ready to raise Luukkonen as the season’s best Finnish goalkeeper in the NHL?

Juuse Saros is of course still the main backbone of Nashville and has also been in high spirits in recent weeks, as there are now six consecutive wins. In these six games, eight goals have been scored behind Saros.

Luukkonen’s statistics for the season are in a completely different category than Saros’s. Luukkonen leads Saro in save percentages, average goals allowed, clean sheets and so on. When looking at the ratio of goals scored to waiting, Saros is minus a goal, Luukkonen is plus eight hits. Saros is still the number one name in the country, but for the first time in years there is real breathing down his neck.

If you compare what Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen did to last season purely through statistics, you have easily the most impressive breakthrough of the domestic NHL season. The average number of goals conceded has dropped from 3.6 to 2.4, and the save percentage has increased from 89 to more than 91. The ratio of conceded goals to expected goals was five goals in the cold last season, now it’s eight.

And we shouldn’t forget that Luukkonen doesn’t play behind a very high-quality team. Amassing hard stats behind Buffalo has been an almost impossible task for any goaltender in recent years. For example, Luukkonen’s average of 2.44 goals conceded has been exceeded in the club twice in the previous 20 years: Ryan Miller in 2010 and Chad Johnson in 2016.

Four clean sheets were last reached in the 2011-2012 season by Miller.

Noste Luukkonen’s career couldn’t come at a sweeter time. Of course, the work is still very much in progress. In earnest, the Finn and the team around him will be tested next time in the coming autumn, when the games will have some meaning again. However, it is very good for Luukkonen to enter the contract negotiations in the summer after the breakthrough season he has seen.

And from the point of view of the Finnish goaltending situation, the youngster’s rise to the NHL’s goalie elite does not come at a bad time either. Saros has been sitting on top of the kingdom’s bathroom cabinet all alone for a long time now. It’s only fitting that at the same time that Miikka Kiprusoff great career was celebrated last weekend in Calgary, a new generation is starting to seriously push itself into the sport’s elite.

This new generation of Luukkonen and another who played a clean sheet on Tuesday Justus Annusen at the helm will carry the banner of top-level Finnish goaltending at a high NHL level probably, and hopefully, for a long time to come.

Story edited at 12:20 p.m. Devon Levi’s citizenship was incorrectly listed.