STANLEY CUP FINAL
Behind Teuvo Teravainen as he stood in the Chicago Blackhawks’ dressing room Wednesday morning, speaking in his native tongue to a Finnish reporter, a crowd was gathering.
Hockey writers from all over North America were waiting their turn. Teravainen sensed their presence but dreaded facing them.
“You want me to keep talking to you in Finnish until they go away?” the reporter asked.
“Yes, please do that,” begged the 20-year-old.
Twelve hours later, there was no place to hide — not when he’d scored the first and set up the second Chicago goal in a 2-1 comefrom-behind victory over Tampa Bay in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final.
“When I scored the goal, the first thing was, oh no, I have to go out in the media after the game,” said Teravainen, dubbed Turbo by his teammates.
“Are we that scary?” a reporter asked. “Yeah,” he replied, “you are.” It seems a far cry from the outwardly cocky teenager, drafted 18th overall in 2012, whose much anticipated arrival at his first NHL training camp was heralded by a newspaper’s fanciful artwork of him in Superman garb, towering over the Windy City skyline.
Scotty Bowman, no less, had compared him to Igor Larionov. But, um, no pressure, kid. Now, two seasons have passed and Teravainen, called up for keeps from the AHL team in Rockford when Patrick Kane suffered his broken collarbone in late February, is finally starting to make good on the promise he showed when he powered Finland to the 2014 world junior championship, and led the tournament in scoring.
How much promise, as a pro, is a question no one really wants to answer. But it’s a lot, that much is clear.
A great hockey organization is a constantly evolving organism and the Hawks, as Jonathan Toews and Kane enter the mature years of their prime, are breaking in the lavishly skilled Teravainen for a growing role on a team hoping to win its third Stanley Cup in six seasons.
“I think he’s got lots of upside,” head coach Joel Quenneville said Thursday. “We have a couple of guys that have achieved the top, top level. I think watching these guys on a regular basis could help him grow, help him learn what it takes to be a great player, game in, game out — you know, expectations, other teams trying to keep an eye on you.
“That’s way too much pressure to say he’s going to be one of those guys, but it’s nice knowing we look forward to him being a top player.”
Before that happens, he’ll probably have to put on some muscle — at five-foot-11 and 178 pounds, with an early background in the basically non-contact European sport of floorball, he’s ripe for getting pushed around — and he may have to develop a little better off-season work ethic.
“The kid will have to realize golf is not training,” kidded 40-year-old defenceman Kimmo Timonen, who Teravainen says has been “like a second dad for me right now, ’cause my real dad is far, far in Finland.”
Mentorship likely will have to come from elsewhere in the future, because Timonen’s NHL days are numbered, but for now, the Blackhawks are just happy Teravainen — who managed only nine points in 34 regular season games — already has eight in 13 playoff contests, and seems to be gaining in confidence daily.
“He’s a talented, talented guy — one of the most talented guys I see,” the Hawks’ Marian Hossa said. “Sees the ice really well. He doesn’t seem to have a heartbeat. He’s so calm. He’s Finnish cold.”
Teravainen’s tying goal Wednesday was “a seeing-eye single — that puck had eyes,” Tampa head coach Jon Cooper said, but the Helsinki-born winger scored a very similar goal for the winner in Chicago’s Game 1 comeback win over Minnesota.
On Antoine Vermette’s winning goal Saturday, Teravainen reached in and chipped the puck off the stick of Lightning forward J.T. Brown, who was trying to clear it along the boards, and the puck went right to Vermette in the slot.
Quenneville doesn’t believe in coincidences. He thinks it’s no accident the puck finds its way into the net for certain players.
“Top players are top players because they produce, they have the puck a lot, they can make plays,” the coach said.
“Sometimes (Teravainen) maybe looks for the perfect play. We try to encourage him to just get pucks through. Getting pucks to the net can result in action at the net. Sometimes they go in.”
So the aim, he said, is “getting more of a shot mentality to his game. I think Kaner’s evolution, he always could make plays, great with the puck. When he starts getting to be a threat to shoot, there’s a lot of coverage issues for the opponents.”
There, he said it: Kane. Players like that, or like Igor Larionov, for that matter, don’t come along every day, but the kid they call Turbo is only 20. You never know.