Finley’s cool with arrested development
Former hot Preds prospect finds peace as York constable . . . and wishes Rinne well
As goaltending talent goes, the police officer drinking coffee in a Yonge Street cafe once possessed everything an NHL team dreams about. When scouts drooled over Brian Finley, they pointed out his six-footfour athleticism, his “Gumby-like” flexibility, and a quiet focus that made him the most dominant goaltender in the Ontario Hockey League in the late 1990s.
“He was quick as a cat,” remembers Mitch Korn, the longtime NHL goaltending coach. “And he was laid-back as all get-out, just like Carey Price is today.”
So when the Nashville Predators were looking for a goaltender to build around, they chose Finley with the sixth overall pick in the 1999 draft. Sixth overall. Only a shortlist of goaltenders had been taken that high in the draft before Finley. Only a few, like Price and Marc-Andre Fleury, have been taken higher since. The Predators seemed certain he’d be their goaltender of the future — certain enough to bestow on him a signing bonus worth about $1.25 million (U.S.) and a three-year contract loaded with performance bonuses.
As Nashville GM David Poile said at the time: “When you use your first pick, you better be sure of what you have.” But anyone who watches the NHL knows that Finley isn’t playing for the Predators these days — he never really did, save for a brief cameo of an NHL career that spanned parts of four games.
“If you would have asked me at the time I was drafted, I would have thought I’d at least be a serviceable backup,” Finley said in an interview. “It just didn’t work out.”
The man in the crease for Nashville, of course, is Pekka Rinne — who, at age 34, has been the best goaltender in these Stanley Cup playoffs. Finley, 35, knows Rinne well. In Finley’s final year with the Predators’ AHL affiliate in Milwaukee, in 2005-06, there wasn’t much difference between their numbers. But there was a vast difference in their approach that went a long way to explaining their divergent career paths.
“I was very close with Pekka. He’s a calm, relaxed guy. Doesn’t overly stress anything. So he was always consistent. And I was up and down,” Finley said. “And even if he did have a bad game, it really wasn’t that big a deal to him, whereas I would stay up at night thinking about it.”
So while Rinne, drafted 258th overall as an eighth-round afterthought, would soon enough emerge as a star, Finley would disappear from the sports world’s view. Retired
“After I was drafted, mentally, I lost my mojo . . . I just always felt a tremendous amount of grief and anxiety.” BRIAN FINLEY
from the game since 2007, he’s been a York Regional police officer since 2009, these days working as a detective constable in the personal crimes division of the force. He says he doesn’t play sports anymore — save for an appearance in a charity event a decade ago when he strapped on the pads. And he doesn’t watch much hockey. “Mostly just the highlights,” Finley said.
For him, there were many highlights. There were appearances for Canada in the under-17, under-18 and under-20 world championships. There was an OHL goaltender of the year award in 1999 as a member of the Barrie Colts. And there were a handful of seasons in the minor leagues, mostly as a member of the AHL’s Milwaukee Admirals, which Finley calls “some of the best times of my life.”
But there are regrets, too. Ultimately, he says, the pressure of pro sports weighed on him in a way he couldn’t bear.
“After I was drafted, mentally, I lost my mojo . . . I just always felt a tremendous amount of grief and anxiety. You know, ‘I’m drafted here. I have to perform for them. They’re paying me now.’ And I never felt that prior to (signing with the Predators),” Finley said. “You see it in sports all the time. A golfer loses his swing. Or Ricky Romero (the ex-Blue Jays ace). He’s a great pitcher one year, and the next he can’t pitch in the minors. I would have times when I was really hot and really good. But then I had games where I was awful.”
His brief glimpses of NHL opportunity didn’t go well. In his NHL debut, on New Year’s Day 2003, Finley allowed three goals on 13 shots in relief of Tomas Vokoun.
“Guys I’d stop in the minors or in junior would score on me in the NHL,” Finley said. “Because I was like, ‘This is another level. You have to perform now. This is your chance.’ Nashville always had great goalies. So you’d feel the pressure.”
Injuries were a factor, to be sure. The season after he was drafted — after he put up a 1.62 goals against average and .929 save percentage in four NHL pre-season games and might have played for the Predators had Mike Dunham’s contract holdout dragged out longer — Finley was sent back to junior. There, along with playing in a league in which he had nothing left to prove, he played about 20 games with a groin tear so severe that it subsequently required surgery and he spent most of a year away from the game.
“I remember (the surgeon) saying he’d only seen one (case) worse than mine,” Finley said.
Korn says Finley was never the same after the surgery. Finley figures he eventually regained his pre-surgery capabilities, perhaps minus a smidgen of flexibility. Mentally, though, he only seemed to get worse. Not that he didn’t try to get better.
“There were times I did work with (a sports psychologist) and I felt good. But it’s continuing to do that and say, ‘Even though I’m playing well and feeling good, I need this non-stop,’ ” Finley said. “You don’t want to be that guy.”
Finley said if he could talk to his 20-something self today, he’d remind the youngster that hockey, ultimately, is “just a game.”
“Yeah, there’s money, management, coaches, pressure to win. But it’s just a game, and I could never get that in my head,” Finley said. “I just felt a lot of guilt. ‘I’m getting hurt. I’m not playing well.’ It was so, so strong that it almost dictated how I played . . . But it’s on me. It’s not on anyone else. Nashville’s a great organization, great top to bottom. And how they’re doing speaks for itself.”
Police work, he said, makes his run at the hockey dream seem “like another lifetime.”
“Stuff I’ve seen — I had never seen a dead body. I had never dealt with high-level criminals,” Finley said. “As a regular person, you just don’t see it. You don’t interact with it. You know it’s out there, but it’s in the Toronto Star, ‘This happened here.’ But to actually experience it and see it, it’s very interesting. You deal with so many people. Stuff you would never see, you see it.”
Korn, who worked with Finley for years in Nashville and is now the goaltending coach with the Washington Capitals, said Finley’s story illustrates the fine line between making it and not, between minorleaguer and NHL regular.
“It tells you how hard it is. You can be all-world, win every award imaginable — which he did. You can be blessed with an unbelievable body and quickness — which he was. And it’s fragile. And it’s hard,” Korn said. “And not only is it hard making it, it’s so hard sustaining it. The more I’m in it, the more I realize it.”
Finley, for his part, said while he’s not watching every night, he’s cheering for the Predators in their Western Conference final against the Anaheim Ducks. He’s married and living in Toronto with two toddlers now. They’re both boys. They’re both showing an interest in the sport that gave their father so much, but took its toll, too.
“They love it. But that’s the one thing I already told them: ‘You’re not being a goalie,’ ” Finley said, laughing a little. “Ultimately it’s going to be their choice. If they want to (play goal), I’ll support them. But hopefully they’re a forward or defenceman. I hope they’ll stick to scoring goals. It’ll make it easier on me and my wife.”