When the seventh-round NHL draft begins to make its way to the world’s toughest hockey league, there is no easy way out. Where the first-round reserve shifts, even those crazy ones, are offered endless opportunities from time to time, nothing is given to the boys at the back desk.
Know this Valtteri Puustinenwho left for North America as a 22-year-old Finnish champion, junior world champion and men’s World Cup medalist as a reservation for the stoppage round in Pittsburgh.
After reaching the other side of the Atlantic, the KalPa grower’s path quickly led to the AHL side of the so-called iron league. The address was Wilkes-Barre, a city of about 45,000 people in the state of Pennsylvania. Like the NHL team, the bus league team is also called penguins.
Puustisinen’s game started to go quickly in the farm, but the Pittsburgh NHL organization did not seem to be in a hurry with the Finn, on the contrary. Puustinen was his team’s best scorer in both his first and second farm seasons, but the phone didn’t pick up.
– Yes, in the name of honesty, I started to wonder if I would get a chance at all. Quite a lot of NHL forwards came from there, but I didn’t receive an invitation, even though I think the games went well, Puustinen recalls in an interview with Urheilu.
Puustinen started to travel from the sky, which is traveled by fewer and fewer Finnish players in North America. In recent years, only St. Louis Kasperi Kapanen has made a bigger splash in the NHL after going through years of being in the AHL. It emerges from previous years Ville Nieminen.
The reasons are human. While the minimum salary in the NHL is close to a million dollars, with a two-way contract, Puustinen’s farm salary remained at 70,000 dollars in the first two seasons, for example.
There would be significantly bigger contracts available from Europe for a player of Puustisinen’s level. In the one-year contract signed last summer, Puustisinen’s farm salary was increased to 385,000 dollars, and on the NHL side to 842,500 dollars.
– I started this season with the idea that I would come to watch for another year. The whole time I had the feeling that I would be able to play in the NHL, if only I got a reasonable chance.
It was worth watching
The invitation to the NHL came already in the autumn season and Puustinen hasn’t looked back since. Even though Pittsburgh’s season as a team has been really dark, the Kuopio native’s breakthrough and energetic work have been among the few joys of the steel city’s champion team.
Puustinen has brought to Pittsburgh exactly the kind of sizzling freshness that the rotten players in the wider area would like.
Tehojak (39, 4+12=16) has been blessed as a reward for a job well done.
– The game started rolling right away and I got confirmation that I can play here. I consider my strengths to be reading and seeing the game, and I thought that it might be even easier for me in the NHL, because in the AHL game it hurts and happens so much more. There will be less of such silly things here. It has made it easier, Puustinen states.
Puustinen still does not admit to being satisfied.
– It always helps when you score a few points. However, I am used to doing them. I could still afford to pick up the pace, so I’m not going to settle for anything now, but I have to push forward all the time.
After all, could it be that Pittsburgh’s plan with Puustisinen’s longer AHL marination was right? Many young people suffer from riding the bus in the iron league, but does that sometimes mean they miss out on a big prize?
Puustinen looks back happily.
– It’s always annoying when someone else gets up there, even though the game is going well. It wasn’t difficult for me there. The games went well and I just thought that in the end it’s all up to you. I couldn’t help but press on and think that the reward will always come at some point. You can’t start messing around with that.
– And when you think that my language skills weren’t good at the beginning and so on, that’s why it’s been easier to jump to the NHL now. After a couple of years of studying, I have mastered the language, being in general and living, so jumping here was easy.
Deep waters as a team
Where Puustinen steams in the rink night after night energetically hoping for the next NHL contract, Pittsburgh as a club is sinking to depths it has not been to since the beginning of the 2000s.
The top players are getting old, and it has not been possible to bring in enough young energy like Puustisen. The team, which is about to fall out of the playoffs for good, has collapsed in confusing ways on a few occasions.
For example, at the beginning of March, after terrible performances, they lost in five days, first to Edmonton away 1-6 and then at home to Washington 0-6.
– It has been painful. That is something that has probably happened to us many times. Edmonton was a perfect past day for everyone. Yes, after such matches, the leading players are vocal, but maybe not more so here, Puustinen laughs.
One of the most depressing days of the season for the team’s key players was the Thursday before the transfer deadline (March 7), when the club traded the star player By Jake Guentzel To Carolina. Captain Sidney Crosby the low-key and even stilted interviews after the incident told a lot.
– We had a game that day (Washington 0–6) and the next day off. It’s hard to say how it was reacted to. When we got back to work, I didn’t notice anything myself. It was handled quite professionally, from what I saw.