The incredible hockey experience came to an end early Saturday morning Finnish time. The NHL’s 1,312-game regular season was wrapped up with the back-to-back match between Colorado and Nashville, and oh my brothers, the finished regular season was a five-star experience!
When you look back at the finished regular season, you can only come to one conclusion: the NHL product is in unprecedented good oxygen.
Life in the NHL isn’t perfect either, but in the name of honesty, it must be said that the three-letter league has tuned its product to excellent condition over the past few years. Now at the center of everything are the game and the superstars of the new generation who implement it in a completely exceptional way.
The world’s best and most skilled players have always played in the NHL, but there is something magical about the new era at hand.
Generation Z is ready to break boundaries and go where no one has gone before through individual skills. This year, there have been more incredible performances by far and away the brightest superstar in the sport. Connor McDavid’s under.
Now it’s speed and skill that determine, and it shows in the number of goals. Who still remembers the time after the turn of the millennium?
For example, in 2000, 2002 and 2004 – now we are talking about the era of the dead puck – the winner of the NHL point exchange did not get a hundred points. In the 2001–2002 season in the NHL, an average of 5.24 goals were scored per game.
Now we live in a completely different world.
In the current season, the teams scored the seventh most (6.36) goals per match. You have to go back to the 1993-94 season to find a tougher goals-per-match tally – and now we remember that goalkeepers, for example, are from a completely different planet than they were 30 years ago.
At the center of everything now is individual skill. Individualism thrives, whether hockey purists like it or not.
No fewer than 11 players crossed the 100 power point mark in the regular season that ended. Once again, we are talking about a level that has not been operated in the NHL for thirty years.
An incredible 38 players who played at least 20 matches operated with an average of over a point per match. Last year we went over forty, but in recent years the level has hovered around twenty.
The readings are confusing.
Clean game
To top it off, the game is cleaner than ever before. Of course, ice hockey is still a contact sport, where perfection is never achieved with, for example, head injuries, but the sport is doing better than ever in this regard. The evolution of the sport has cleared the unnecessary fist heroes from the game, and fights are seen less and less.
While the league is still cleaning up fights that escalate from clean tackles, there is one important step taken in the right direction.
All the same, the NHL is alive and well in the broader view, if not excellent.
Hockey has produced an incredible number of top-class hockey coaches at the elite level, who have taken the entertainment value of the dollar league through the roof of the arenas. Youth, athleticism and open-minded playing are great values for the NHL of the new era. Values that appeal not only to old disc purists but also to younger consumers.
If the NHL, which is still strongly marginalized in North America’s big entertainment circus, wants to grow, the product must be taken in this direction. In the era of Tiktok, unnecessary fights between toothless Canadians do not appeal to the youth.
The long Regular Series, in particular, is first and foremost entertainment, and the NHL has taken giant strides in producing it.
When the Lord Stanley Cup starts to be played in earnest early Tuesday morning in the playoffs, the conversation takes a completely new direction, and the individualistic values of Generation Z are not hard currency there. However, that is a different discussion.
As for the regular season, we saw a fantastic whole, where one game after another was worth the three hours it took. Even in Finland, we saw a huge number of excellent matches in prime time, for which the NHL deserves a hat-trick. Expansion towards Europe is the future.
One top performance per slot
Briefly about the season in terms of Finns.
Mikko Rantanen Joining the 50-50 club is a big deal at the moment in Finnish top hockey. Only Finns have broken the 50 goals and 50 assists mark in the same season Jari Kurri (fourth) and Teemu Selänne (twice).
Read more: Mikko Rantanen doesn’t count bruises or look for friends in the rink – this is how he rose to an incredible achievement in the NHL
Nashville Juuse Saros was already known to be the toughest goaltender of the entire NHL season Miro Heiskanen defender elite. Heiskanen hit the board with a whopping 73 (11+62) power points, breaking new Dallas defenders’ point records. According to the Finns, the record fell short of a point. Heiskanen’s teammate Roope Hintz also played a strong season.
Range was the Finns’ trump card this season, for example Alexander Barkov and Sebastian Aho our top players did not hit the bull’s eye in the regular season. At the same time, for example Matias Maccelli, Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Eetu Luostarinen, Kaapo Kako, Juuso Pärssinen, Eeli Tolvanen and Juuso Välimäki positively surprised.
No less than 13 Finns crossed the forty point limit, seven went over fifty.
And let’s not forget the players who shine at the top level, far from the glory of power statistics: Dallas Esa Lindell and Jani Hakanpää are the most successful Finns in their respective roles this season.
Still, Finns still have a somewhat vague feeling about the regular season. There were many who succeeded, but at the same time only Rantanen, Heiskanen and Saros really hit the middle of the board.
There is still better to come.
You can find the NHL’s playoff pairs and the Finns seen in the playoffs in this article.
Connor McDavid EDM 82 64+89=153
Leon Draisaitl EDM 80 52+76=128
David Pastrnak BOS 82 61+52=113
Nikita Kucherov TBL 82 30+83=113
Nathan MacKinnon’s COL 71 42+69=111
Jason Robertson DAL 82 46+63=109
Matthew Tkachuk FLA 79 40+69=109
Mikko Rantanen COL 82 55+50=105
Ryan Nugent-Hopkin’s EDM 82 37+67=104
Elias Pettersson VAN 80 39+63=102
Erik Karlsson SJS 82 25+76=101
Jack Hughes NJD 78 43+56=99
Mitchell Marner TOR 80 30+69=99
Brayden Point TBL 82 51+44=95
Tage Thompson BUF 78 47+47=94
Mikko Rantanen COL 82 55+50=105
Aleksander Barkov FLA 68 23+55=78
Roope Hintz DAL 73 37+38=75
Miro Heiskanen DAL 79 11+62=73
Sebastian Aho CAR 75 36+31=67
Patrik Laine CBJ 55 22+30=52
Artturi Lehkonen COL 64 21+30=51
Matias Maccelli ARZ 64 11+38=49
Jesperi Kotkaniemi CAR 82 18+25=43
Eetu Monastic FLA 82 17+26=43
Erik Haula NJD 80 14+27=41
Mikael Granlund PIT 79 10+31=41
Kaapo Second NYR 82 18+22=40
Teuvo Teräväinen CAR 68 12+25=37
Kasperi Kapanen STL 66 15+19=34
Below you can listen to the latest Ika änäri episode. Boston’s unfathomable winning record, Carolina’s streak and Finnish players Juuse Saros and Mikael Granlund are discussed. You can find all Ika änäri podcasts at this link.