Quite an adventure
Goalie’s first year as pro takes some bizarre turns
After several weeks of reflection and relaxation, Emil Larmi woke up one recent morning and headed to the airport. The Penguins had asked him to fly across the Atlantic from his native Finland to join them for Phase 2 of the NHL’s return-to-play protocol.
But for the umpteenth time in his first year of pro hockey in North America, the quirky 23-year-old goalie’s plans were foiled.
“I wasn’t allowed to get on the plane because I didn’t have all the 67 documents, one dinosaur and a few drops of unicorn blood,” he wrote on social media last week. “I only had 58 documents, wrong dinosaur and just the horn of the unicorn.”
Larmi finally made it to Pittsburgh a few days later, but that latest travel snafu wouldn’t even crack a top-10 list of memorable moments, good or bad, Larmi experienced in his tornado of a calendar year.
At an age when many graduate from college, he was crowned a champion in Finland’s top pro league, wooed by NHL teams and left home for a foreign land. In the U.S., he split the season between Wilkes-Barre/ Scranton and Wheeling, faced a health scare and went through rough patches that had him questioning whether he belonged here.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, and he scurried home.
“During those 14 days in quarantine [upon returning to Finland], I had some time to think about and go through everything,” Larmi said over the phone. “I could write a book about my season. Yeah, there was so much going on.”
Adjustment period
After getting passed over in the NHL draft, Larmi blossomed into a top goalie in Finland. Last spring, he led HPK to its first Liiga title in 13 years. He then decided to make the jump to North America, picking Pittsburgh as his landing spot.
He turned heads at prospect development camp with his lateral quickness and flair and had his moments in his first NHL training camp. But the plan all along was to get him a lot of AHL action in 2019-20. As is often the case for Europeans, the adjustment to North American hockey, where the ice surface is smaller and the action is faster proved difficult.
So was Larmi’s transition to life in the United States.
His hometown of Lahti is among Finland’s largest cities, and Finns learn English in school. But using it to navigate everyday tasks was a far greater test. The first time he went to a grocery store, Larmi was there for more than three hours. Trying to acquire wheels was also tricky. He felt more comfortable communicating with dealers via email. He was surprised to find it was a one-way street.
“No one was answering me,” he said. “I was like, ‘OK, don’t take my money.’ ”
After hilariously chronicling the ordeal on social media, Larmi found a dealer who helped him pick the right car. But when it was time to complete the paperwork, Larmi approached another speed bump. And that’s how he spent as much time at the DMV as he did in the crease.
“Every time they told us, ‘You need this paper,’ and we didn’t have it. We would go get it and come back the next day. And then they’d tell us, ‘Now you need this paper.’ I don’t know why she didn’t tell us we needed all of these papers,” Larmi said, letting out a hearty laugh. “Maybe she was just playing with us?”
After two months of hassles like that, Larmi finally started to get comfortable. It helped that he was one of a few Finns on the AHL team — blue-liner Nicklas Almari had been his teammate for HPK — and that the starting goalie was so welcoming.
A helping hand
Casey DeSmith first met Larmi at goaltending coach Mike Buckley’s annual goalie summit in Portsmouth, N.H. DeSmith said Larmi was shy at first. Neither of them expected to be teammates for the 2019-20 season, but, after the Penguins hung onto Tristan Jarry and sent down DeSmith, they ended up becoming fast friends.
“He had really broken English. He didn’t know much about America. So he kind of gravitated toward me because I was his goalie partner,” DeSmith said. “Goalies like to stick together. It was a mutual gravitation toward each other.”
Larmi and the New Hampshire native often roomed together on the road and sat side by side on bus trips. They talked shop about hockey, discussed life in Finland versus the U.S. Larmi showed DeSmith lots of pictures of cars. DeSmith also dragged Larmi along to play disc golf, his favorite office pastime.
Over time, Larmi’s English got better, his guard went down, and he joked around more.
“Around the rink, he’s kind of like me in the sense that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He likes to joke around and keep it loose. We had a lot of fun this year,” DeSmith said. “But, obviously, he takes his game very seriously.”
Right away, his new teammates and the Wilkes-Barre/ Scranton coaching staff saw that Larmi had the potential to join the long line of Finnish goalies who reached the NHL. He has quick feet, good athleticism and fierce competitiveness.
“He literally never gives up on a puck,” DeSmith said. “It doesn’t even matter if it’s the fourth shot of a drill where you shouldn’t even be playing the rebound. He’s just one of those guys who can’t give up on a puck. That’s a good quality.”
Larmi earned his first AHL win Oct. 16, stopping 30 of 33 shots. But his season quickly went off the rails, largely due to circumstances out of his control.
Nine days later, in his next start, he headed to the home locker room at Mohegan Sun Arena for the second intermission. Two minutes before the Penguins were to step back out onto the ice, Larmi mouthed to Almari, “I feel a bit weird.”
‘That wasn’t my plan’
Larmi said what happened next was like an outof-body experience. “I started to get shaky and started to pass out, but I never really passed out. I was really close. I remember I was almost falling on the bench.”
Teammates huddled around him and hollered for help. While the medical staff attended to Larmi, the rest of the team had to go chase a puck around.
“Almari told me he didn’t know if I was going to die or what. He just had to leave me and go play some hockey,” Larmi said. “Yeah, it was scary for all of us.”
In the next few days, Larmi visited doctors, including a cardiologist, to get a handle on what happened. The belief is he took a knee to the head late in the second period, suffered a concussion and quickly began experiencing symptoms.
“That was the only explanation for what happened,” he said. “After a concussion, it’s always scary because you don’t know how long it’s going to take to recover. But I was lucky that it didn’t do too much and I was back on the ice soon.”
Larmi was cleared to practice two weeks later, but he returned to a crowded crease. DeSmith was starting to find his game, and Dustin Tokarski had played well after being called up from Wheeling of the ECHL to fill in for the Finn. Larmi got rocked in his first start after the health scare and allowed four goals in his next one. On Dec. 19, he was reassigned to Wheeling.
“It surprised. That wasn’t my plan,” he said. “My plan was to play in the AHL and play a lot, get better, try to be closer to the NHL. Yeah, the season was tough after the injury. There were a lot of things going on. Casey was in Wilkes. When I played, I was not as good as I could be. I’m not blaming anyone else.”
Larmi posted a shutout in his ECHL debut and a .959 save percentage while winning three of his first four starts. He got another shot in the arm in January, when the Penguins had to call up Larmi to the NHL to back up Matt Murray in Montreal after DeSmith lost his passport and couldn’t make the trip.
“If anyone were to take my place going up, I’m glad it was him,” DeSmith said. “I think that getting called up was maybe a spark he needed to get back into the positive zone and kind of remember what he was working toward.”
Heading home, for now
Larmi got the call back to Wilkes-Barre a week later. His confidence surging, he allowed five total goals over his next three starts. But after one poor outing and with the other goalies entrenched, he finished the season in Wheeling. He was there when the sports world screeched to a halt March 12.
“When they stopped the season, I think that was the right call,” he said. “At that time, I knew that [public] health was the main [concern]. At that point, I felt like I didn’t actually want to play. Not because of us, but other people, all the people that might not survive the virus. So I think that was the right call.”
Once the NHL and AHL told players they could return to their home countries, Larmi and his fiance packed up their apartment in Wilkes-Barre, drove across the state to Pittsburgh, left their car and hopped on an international flight. Larmi was in Finland for more than 10 weeks.
“Of course, during those hard times, there was a lot going on in my head. Like ‘I want to quit hockey. I hate my life.’ Stuff like that,” he said, letting out another big laugh. “But I still think there’s a lot of things I learned. It wasn’t just a waste of time to be there, and I think those things can help me in the future.”
Cutting down his movements instead of sprawling around and maintaining his poise were points of emphasis for Larmi on the ice. He also acknowledges he must be better at separating his job and his personal life after too many nights spent in his Wilkes-Barre apartment obsessing over a rocky game or practice.
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton coach Mike Vellucci remains high on the young goalie.
“Very good prospect. It’s tough for goalies the first year after coming out of junior or coming overseas. I expect him to rebound and have a great year,” he said.
“I’m not happy about the last year,” Larmi said. “But I’m happy about what’s going to happen in the future.”