Niklas Kokko captures the attention of a sea of onlookers as soon as he takes the ice at rookie camp. Debuting a flashy set of tentacled pads and peering out from a teal mask, he looks every part a Kraken goaltender. But it’s not his gear that’s catching eyes.
With a poise beyond his years and that of the skill of his opponents– prospects ranging from 18 to 23 and predominantly lacking professional experience– Kokko saves nearly every shot he faces in drills. There’s a smooth, measured quality to his reactions, and an accuracy indicating an instinctual ability to read plays. Overcommitments are a rarity.
Kokko, 20, gets the nod for Seattle’s inaugural Rookie Faceoff game at the Los Angeles Kings’ practice facility in El Segundo, California two days later. Against the Colorado Avalanche prospect pool he stuns, making 29 saves to lift the Kraken up-and-comers to a 5-1 win.
Three games into the preseason he supports Joey Daccord at home– a privilege he alone earns– and survives until the fourth round of cuts. But Kokko’s inevitable reassignment to Coachella Valley is indicative of his progress rather than any failure. He’ll beat Victor Östman for the coveted Firebirds backup job to cement his standing as ‘fourth-string’ behind Ales Stezka, and win all six of his first-ever AHL starts.
There’s a reason Kokko is the first of the organization’s four goalie prospects to begin his professional career in North America.
“He’s incredibly talented and has a lot of passion for the game,” Daccord remarked during training camp. Seattle’s bonafide starter befriended Kokko gearing up for the present season, finding a “big personality” underneath the young Finn’s even-keeled demeanor.
“You can tell when someone gets in the net right away whether they have that ‘presence,’ and I think he has that.”
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Statement-making goaltending is foreign to the Kraken. Philipp Grubauer holds a .892 SV% over his 183-game, four-year tenure. Unusually plentiful goal support masked sophomore season rental Martin Jones’ erratic play during his brief stop in Seattle. Expansion draftee Chris Driedger spent the better part of three years with the team injured.
Daccord couldn’t even confidently be called starting material until last January, seizing the number one job in Grubauer’s injured absence with a .950 SV% over 12 games. Once he made his NHL debut with the Ottawa Senators in 2019, the 28-year-old lingered on the cusp of the league.
Thus, Kokko’s arrival is intriguing.
The Oulu native and 58th overall pick in the 2022 NHL Entry Draft is beginning his North American career following an impressive first full season in the SM-Liiga, Finland’s top men’s league. Over 23 regular season games he recorded a .916 SV% for the Pelicans, and his .925 SV% and 1.81 GAA in 17 games were second-best among all goalies in the Liiga playoffs.
Before that, he maintained save percentages of .900 or better in Finland’s mid-tier and junior leagues from 2020-21 on.
Two years remain on Grubauer’s six-year contract, leaving Daccord the only certain fixture of the Kraken’s tandem for the foreseeable future– his five-year, $25 million extension kicks in next season. The backup role could be up for grabs sooner rather than later, and Kokko is already on track to become the first franchise-developed goalie to play for Seattle.
If he does, he’ll also be the first of three Finnish goalies taken in three consecutive drafts to do so. Fellow countrymen Visa Vedenpää and Kim Saarinen were selected by the Kraken in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
“We draft on talent. We draft on goalies or players that excite us,” Andrew Allen, Seattle’s goalie scout, explained over the phone. “It just so happened in the last three years that we were really excited about three Finnish goalies.”
The future of goaltending in Seattle may be coincidentally Finnish, but that the country boasts a track record of elite goalies is completely by design.
Ranked top-10 in the world in men’s and women’s hockey by the IIHF every year since their World Rankings’ inception, and the proud owner of a gold, two silver, and eight bronze Olympic medals across both programs, Finland is a hockey force to be reckoned with. The Nordic country is home to the second-largest percentage of IIHF-registered players relative to their population size, the smallest among the ‘big six’ also including Canada, the United States, Russia, Sweden, and Czechia.
Although the first Finnish goalies in the NHL didn’t arrive until the late 80s, they set the stage for Finland’s surge in net at the turn of the century.
Among European countries, Finland ties with Sweden for the most goalies to play at least one game in the NHL (41) all-time. Only 3.37% of goalies that played at least a game during the 2000-01 season were Finnish, a number that’s grown to 8.16% in 2023-24 and 10.23% so far this season. The high, set in 2020-21, is 13.37% (13 of 98 goalies).
Miikka Kiprusoff, Pekka Rinne, and Tuukka Rask won Finland’s first three Vezinas between 2006 and 2018, and a Finn has won or finished top-three in voting for the honor twelve times since the 2003-04 season. Today, the Nashville Predators’ Juuse Saros’ .916 career SV% is already 21st-highest in NHL history. Kevin Lankinen became the first goalie ever to win all of his first 10 road starts for the Vancouver Canucks earlier this month.
“I’ve seen goaltending all over the world and different ways of approaching it. Every country’s got their own ways of how they develop and how they learn,” Allen reflected. “It’s a great country, a great culture for goaltending.”
Stints as a goaltending consultant with the Japanese Ice Hockey Federation and a coach with the AHL’s Rockford IceHogs and Buffalo Sabres comprise Allen’s career until his hiring by Seattle in 2020. He credits former Chicago Blackhawks goalie scout Markus Korhonen and current Kraken European scout Sasu Hovi with introducing him to goaltending in their home country of Finland. Both men played the position themselves.
While no goaltender with any hopes of longevity in the league is exempt from the rare highlight reel split or scorpion– and each can exhibit unique tendencies regardless of nationality– a vividly Finnish style has emerged.
Incisive technicality (means of movement, puck stopping, and stick handling) and an intentionally phlegmatic temperament reduce the vulnerabilities created by excessive movement, equipping them with an almost prescient accuracy. Prioritizing catching pucks initially instead of blocking them helps limit deadly rebounds, hence their aggressive hands.
“They’re well coached, but they’re not robotic,” Allen explained. “They’re not just letting pucks hit them– they’re reading well. They’re natural goaltenders, natural puck stoppers.”
Using wider rinks with shallow corners, dump-ins aren’t as common in Finnish hockey. Possession is of greater importance, diminishing the need for puck handling. Allen notices the speed of opposing forechecks in pursuit of loose pucks behind the net initially catches Finnish goalies– inexperienced handlers– off guard.
Athleticism and “active hands” are hallmark characteristics of the Finnish goaltender according to Avalanche backup Scott Wedgewood, yet to witness Saros’ smaller frame limit his former tandem partner’s ability to stay competitive. Standing at 5’11 hasn’t stopped the Finn from recording an impressive .921 five-on-five SV% in 156 games since 2022-23, the most played by any goalie in that frame.
“I’ve never seen it before, it’s honestly impressive to watch. I’ve been trying to creep on him from the side a little bit to see what’s working,” Wedgewood joked of Saros’ flexibility, his practice and pregame stretches. “He’s got a talented ability to be patient but also aggressive, and it’s fun to watch him play. He’s a smaller guy, he plays in a deep squat with his chest up, and he plays bigger than what he is height-wise.”
With each of Kokko, Vedenpää, and Saarinen listed at 6’2 or taller, height is an asset for the Kraken goaltending pipeline– Semyon Vyazovoi, a Russian drafted in 2021, is just as tall. But the Finns may not be as reliant on stature to make saves.
“They’re all very talented from a skill standpoint. They have good technical bases, they have good feet, and they all have reaction speed,” Allen assessed. “They’re kind of in the mold of what has caught my eye in the last few years, and they all have similar styles, but all have very individual personalities and characteristics to them as well.”
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As goaltending adapts to the evolution of scoring in the NHL, so must developmental techniques adapt.
Wedgewood believes intense national pressure is the culprit behind Canada’s slipping monopoly on goaltending, coupled with the expenses inherent to the position. Germany’s falling behind, Grubauer told Davy Jones’ Locker Room, and those administering national development programs are looking to countries like Finland for clues to improvement. With two German goalies drafted since the Washington Capitals took him in 2010, Grubauer is duly aware of his country’s stagnancy producing the position.
Thirty Finnish goalies have been drafted over that span in comparison, hailing from what Allen describes as a “hierarchy” of a national development system.
Hockey in Finland is comprised of a familiar three-tier structure– Suomi-sarja (low-tier), Mestis (mid-tier), and SM-Liiga (elite)– with the Finnish Ice Hockey Association (FIHA) influential in all despite governing each but the last. Lower leagues supply superior ones with players, similar to the farm system utilized in North America.
Overseeing a smaller population and, consequently, fewer goalies, allows FIHA to exert greater control over goaltender development at every level of the sport, including national endeavors bearing the country’s signature lion crest. Under their authority, Finland is divided into ten regions with an “area chief” of goaltending presiding over each. While they’re not full-time FIHA employees, area chiefs are responsible for educating according to FIHA’s standards the goalie coaches within their domain, of which there are nearly 600 of throughout the country.
Kari Lehtonen and Olli-Pekka Äijälä, FIHA’s two managers of goaltending development, supervise matters on a national scale, consulting with teams in person periodically during the season. Maintaining instructional consistency nationwide, across multiple leagues, would be impossible without a direct line of communication to FIHA. Unique problems faced by goalies and their coaches, sometimes the product of philosophical differences encountered with imports, are then able to be resolved with FIHA’s developmental and stylistic goals in mind.
“In North America, what we’re used to, each goalie coach has their own way and coaches their own way, and there’s not as much– and it is changing over time– but I haven’t seen as much sharing of information in North America as I have in Finland throughout the years,” Allen observed.
No matter their location or level of expertise, Finnish goalie coaches are informed by one governing body, vastly different from the individualized development process seen in Canada and the U.S.
Over a now 17-year career, Wedgewood’s worked under at least 15 different goalie coaches in the CHL, ECHL, AHL, and NHL. It’s a cultural feature of the sport putting the onus on the goalie to decipher what works and what doesn’t from the overload of coaching and information they receive. Everett Silvertips goaltender Jesse Sanche keeps a journal of everything he’s been taught to do so, a trick he learned from former Kamloops Blazers goalie Dylan Garand.
“I have everything written down I do from last year or this year,” Sanche explained. “You just [find] what works for you, and you want to be able to communicate that with your goalie coach and just find the middle ground.”
“They all try to share the knowledge too, rather than just everybody doing their own thing,” Saros said of Finnish goalie coaches. He spent two full seasons in the Liiga before joining the Milwaukee Admirals for the 2015-16 season. “At least for me, I always had smart coaches and we took one step at a time, and not rush, take too big of a leaps in development. I think that, for me, worked.”
Mastery of technique– and the ability to enforce this stylistic priority across a national crop of goaltenders– is what Lehtonen sees as Finland’s greatest strength in development. But with a national style comes national weaknesses, which he believes are Finnish goalies’ lack of urgency, resulting from dependency on technicality and the game’s ever-increasing pace.
“We want to change it a little bit more. We need to be faster, quicker, and reacting to puck better than these days and past. We have to look forward if we want to get the guys to NHL,” Lehtonen said. “We still trust that technique, how technical you are, but we forget that speed.”
Enforcing these changes may be a slow process, Lehtonen acknowledged, but a necessary one if Finland wants to keep up with its international counterparts in the crease. The number of Finnish goalies may be increasing in the NHL, but not necessarily the number of starters— that’s what Lehtonen’s after.
Regardless, Finland’s strengths and weaknesses should not come to define the Finns coming up the pipeline. Kokko, Vedenpää, and Saarinen will bring their own strengths to the franchise.
“It’s more about drafting individuals. And I think these three goalies, their style and the way they play with high end speed and a good technical base is how goalies are successful at the NHL level,” Allen said.
“Finnish goalies in the past have been very good at the NHL level, so there’s a good track record in the country, within Finland. They’re just a country that coaches their goalies well.”