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The Oracle of Ice Hockey: How a 70-year-old Finnish goalie coach is transforming a global sport (The Atlantic)

Until recently, aside from a handful of Americans and Europeans, National Hockey League goalies were overwhelmingly Canadian. But at the turn of the millennium, the Finns began to arrive. In 2002, Pasi Nurminen secured a starting role in Atlanta. The next season, Miikka Kiprusoff led Calgary to the league-championship finals. And then it was as though a dam broke: Vesa Toskala, Kari Lehtonen, Niklas Bäckström, Pekka Rinne, Tuukka Rask. Before 2002, no Finnish goaltender had ever locked down a starting role in the NHL. Suddenly, a country with a population of just more than 5 million people was producing one-sixth of the league’s starting goalies, most of them true blue chips.

The most important Finnish goaltending export to the NHL is Miikka Sakari Kiprusoff, who dominated the league for almost a decade and then abruptly retired just before this season, at age 36. Kiprusoff started for the Finns in the Vancouver Olympic Games, where they won the bronze medal, and is considered among the most gifted athletes ever to tend goal. In 2004, he led an unheralded Calgary Flames team to the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals. He has held the modern NHL record for the fewest goals allowed per game in a single season, and in 2006 he won the league’s award for best goaltender.

Kiprusoff came to Ylönen at the age of 12, in 1989, and became the first goalie to be taken under his wing. “Guys who work with Upi for many years, we probably look a little bit the same,” Kiprusoff told me. “He was huge with controlling the rebounds and controlling the puck, so you have to keep everything,” and when you can’t catch or trap the puck, you have to precisely direct the rebound. They worked constantly on hand-eye coordination, he said, on “controlling the puck and feeling it.”

When Kiprusoff started working with Ylönen, they played badminton, to emphasize the importance of footwork and lateral agility and staying up on one’s toes. (Ylönen would later replace badminton with wrestling.) Throughout his career, Kiprusoff was known for miraculous recoveries, his skates shifting and his glove darting to a seemingly unprotected corner of the goal. His most famous save has been named. “The Scorpion” caused hockey blogs and message boards to light up with paeans: “Thought-less reflexes … the essence of a true ‘read and react’ save,” read one post. “Like a stab to the heart.”

To the casual observer, it looks like the goalie is at the mercy of those attacking, but elite goaltenders turn the hunter into the hunted. They know every skater’s tendencies and adapt accordingly—showing an extra quarter inch of a top corner the way a burlesque dancer will reveal thigh; tricking puck holders into passing when they should shoot; sometimes even forcing a player to hesitate and overthink so that no scoring chance occurs. Kiprusoff was a master at these stratagems. His best saves may have been pure reflex, but he also frequently knew what was coming, because he had engineered it.

And yet arguably, what differentiated Kiprusoff most—at least before his compatriots began arriving in the NHL—was his state of mind. Hockey writers in Canada would regularly refer to Kiprusoff as “aloof,” “enigmatic,” a “sphinx.” When the season ended, he was said to disappear to a remote cabin in the Finnish hinterland. A contact in the Flames’ front office told me it was nearly impossible to get hold of him in the off-season (and this was before he retired).

Kiprusoff’s temperament was most telling, and perhaps most essential, in the seconds after he let in a big goal. Instead of staying down on his knees, shrunken and penitent, the perpetually unshaven native of Turku would push his mask up over his head and casually grab for the water bottle on the net behind him, his face utterly expressionless. The sheer force of this indifference was so astonishing, you’d find yourself second-guessing whether the puck had even gone in the net. It was a gesture beyond ordinary contempt for one’s foe. It suggested that the foe was immaterial, invisible, nothing.

I asked Kiprusoff about the uncanny resemblance between him and Ortio, who is now 22 and quickly rising up through Calgary’s farm system. He broke out in a grin.

“Actually, I remember him. He was a young kid there, and I was playing already. I remember that little boy there. He’s been working his way up to one of the star goalies in the Finnish league, and pushing himself to make it here too ... Yah, he looks good. I think he might be watching me when I played TPS.”