Teravainen warms to playoffs, media
TAMPA, FLA.— When Teuvo Teravainen was a kid in Finland, he took English in school but he slept through it, mostly. This, as it turned out, was a mistake, because in his first year in the National Hockey League, Teravainen wasn’t much rattled by the game’s speed, or by his first playoff game — OK, maybe a little — or by a Game 7 in the conference final, or by playing for the Stanley Cup. Nah. That stuff was fine, he said. Just hockey.
“He doesn’t seem to have a heartbeat,” Chicago’s Marian Hossa said after the 20-year-old Teravainen scored a goal and assisted on another in Chicago’s 2-1 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final. “He’s so calm. He’s Finnish cold.”
Speaking English, though: that was a problem. The first time Teravainen spoke to the media in America, he says that was the most jangled he’s been here.
“It’s getting better, but first time when I came and I had to speak English for the media, I was nervous,” said Teravainen, with his sleepy eyes and his teenage moustache. And even after a season of learning the language, he said that when he scored in Game 1, “I think the first thing was, ‘Oh no, I have to go media right now.’”
“We’re not that terrifying,” a reporter said. “Yes you are,” Teravainen replied. Teravainen is still adorable and Finnish and doe-eyed, and was the very young man of the moment after Game 1 because a shot snuck through traffic late in the third period of a 1-0 game, and then he stripped J.T. Brown of a puck on a forecheck and set up Antoine Vermette for the winner.
The 2012 first-round pick now has three goals and five assists in 13 playoff games in a little under 13 minutes per game, after four goals and five assists in 34 games in his first regular season. Even he called the goal lucky, though the Blackhawks have been trying to get him to shoot, rather than look for the perfect play. But he’s growing up fast, too.
“I think, with time, you can trust him in different situations,” said Chicago coach Joel Quenneville. “We had him out there late in the game. That’s the evolution of trusting him and putting him in situations before. But you earn that.”
Teravainen is important because he has the talent to be a bridge to Chicago’s future as the salary cap closes in. He came to America after three years in the Finnish league, and had to adjust to the smaller rinks, bigger headhunters, and less varnished game of the AHL.
“Sometimes I felt like the puck was more times in the air than on the ice, chip it out, chip it in, things like that,” he said. He dominated the 2014 world junior championship with 15 points in seven games for a gold-medal Finland team, and a little unusually, played both hockey and floorball — basically ball hockey, big in Finland — until he was 14. His mom played it, too. Even in a media setting Teravainen lights up a little talking about what he loved about the game.
“Just to score,” he said. “It’s really similar to hockey, no skates, just can do a lot of things with the ball. It’s a really fast game, and you have to make really quick decisions out there, and the ball is really light, so I think it was fun. I think I learned a lot of things from floorball for hockey, like it helped with stickhandling, maybe, getting better at that.”
Hockey was bigger and offered more adulation, though. The Blackhawks stuck him next to burnished Finnish lion Kimmo Timonen, because while the 40-year-old Timonen can’t keep up with the kids on the ice these days, in these suddenly heady days — Teravainen, the hero! — he can be the plainspoken shepherd.
Asked about Timonen, Teravainen said, “He’s been like a second dad for me right now ’cause my real dad is far, far in Finland.”
“Well, to me, he’s got a lot of work to do, to be honest,” Timonen said. “He can be a superstar in this league. But it’s still in the process that he’s got to realize, ‘OK, I’ve got to make sure summer I work out every day, and I’ve got to watch these guys how they prepare for the games, like Toews and Kane and Keith and these guys.’
“But it’s a perfect team to see what these guys go through every day. I told him, ‘This summer, you’ve got to make sure you work out. Golf is not a workout.’
“He can be like Kaner. The skill level is there. You can’t teach that, to have that kind of skill. You’re born with it. He’s a pretty good skater, but think about when you get 10 pounds of muscle around him. He’s going to be even stronger in the corners and you can hang onto the puck. He can be a superstar, I think.”
Asked what he takes from Kane — Teravainen was also nervous meeting his teammate, one of his playing idols along with Pavel Datsyuk, but said Kane was very nice about it — Teravainen said the same thing: He has watched how strong Kane is on his skates, and how he comes away from battles with the puck. The 5-foot-11, 178-pound Teravainen is still skinny, from his young man’s face to his pinhole wrists to his legs, but he has room to grow.
“Of course, first couple (playoff ) games was like, what is it like?” Teravainen said. “But I think I get every game better and better, and I feel a lot confident right now. I just need to keep getting better and keep getting stronger, of course. You get better when you play. And I think I’ve gotten a lot better.”
The shy kid said it all in English. He didn’t seem scared.