Laine’s flashes tantalizing

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/09/2016 (3352 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — He’s accomplished so much in such a short time it is easy to forget Patrik Laine is still just 18 years old.

A Finnish League championship, gold at the world juniors, MVP honours at the world hockey championship, a second overall selection at the NHL Entry Draft, and all of it in the past 12 months — this is a kid who has pretty much known only success in hockey.

Until now.

With a 3-0 loss at the World Cup to Russia Thursday afternoon — a result that also had the effect of eliminating Team North America and advancing Russia to Saturday’s semifinal against Canada — Laine and his Finnish team both finished this tournament having been blanked.

It’s new — and uncomfortable — territory for both Finland and Laine. The Finns have been an international hockey powerhouse for a very long time and an 0-3 record over the past week — in which Finland was out-scored by an embarrassing combined score of 9-1 — will not play well back home in Helsinki.

As Finland went at this tournament, so too did that nation’s most exciting hockey prospect in a generation. Four months after Laine led all scorers at the world hockey championship, he was held off the scoresheet at this one, registering 10 shots over three games but no goals and no assists.

It’s a rare setback for Laine — and in that, there is value, particularly as he prepares to attend his first NHL training camp this weekend in Winnipeg.

Because let’s face it: there are going to be plenty more setbacks and adversity for Laine in the months — and even years — to come, as a kid who has mostly had his way with peers his own age will now play full time with hockey’s biggest boys.

So how’s Laine handling his first real test of adversity? I’d love to tell you, but the Finns for the first time declined to make Laine available to the media after the game.

Bummer. Laine has shown himself to be brutally honest and when the truth is this stark, well, that’s the stuff of newspaper headlines.

All of which is, no doubt, precisely why Laine wasn’t made available on Thursday. The Finns are smart. Also, they love saunas. And pancakes.

There are lessons to be drawn for Winnipeg Jets fans in what happened to Laine over the past week.

Topping the curriculum is this: Laine is a superb player but he cannot do what he does best — snipe goals with an other-worldly shot — unless he has a supporting cast around him.

There are players in hockey — usually centres — who make everyone around them better by their mere presence. Sidney Crosby is such a player. Jonathan Toews, too. Toronto Maple Leafs fans are hoping Auston Matthews will become one.

But then there is another type of hockey superstars who are at their best when those around them are better. Alex Ovechkin is a player like that. Give Ovechkin a supporting cast — such as the one he has in Washington — and he is the greatest pure goal scorer in the game. But it begins with that supporting cast.

The message here from the past week is that Laine fits more into that latter category, a man who is going to need highly skilled support players in Winnipeg if he is to reach his seemingly unlimited potential and become the man to finally lead Jets Nation out of the wilderness.

The Finns had Laine playing here on a line of kids like himself — 19-year-old Sebastian Aho and 21-year-old Aleksander Barkov were his linemates.

The line showed prodigious flashes from time to time — as did Laine.

Laine’s presence on Finland’s first powerplay unit — where he would set up shop in the faceoff circle and wait for the one-timer like his hero, Alex Ovechkin — offered a tantalizing glimpse of what Laine will bring to a Jets powerplay that desperately needs some new artillery.

And Laine also demonstrated at times over the past week a remarkable puck-handling ability of the type that doesn’t usually go with a man his size. (He has a “now you see it, now you don’t” move he uses to get defenceman reaching that is going to embarrass a lot of NHL veterans for years to come.)

But for all the occassional flashes, Laine, his line and the Finnish power-play unit never were able to generate any sustained zone pressure or much in the way of quality scoring chances.

And some of that, truth be told, is on Laine. The youngster had said prior to the start of this event that he was a bit in awe of the hockey heroes he was going to be playing both with and against at this tournament. And it showed — there was a timidity to Laine’s game at times in this tournament, moments where you wanted him to impose his will — and his size — on a situation only to have him skate to the open ice instead.

Laine will need to do both, of course, in the NHL. And he surely will, eventually.

But that arc will take time for a kid who still needs to grow into his 6-5, 205-pound body. One observer on Twitter during this tournament likened Laine right now to one of those puppies with huge paws that you sometimes see.

They look goofy and awkward now. But you can just tell that eventually they will grow into those paws and acquire a very loud bark.

The end of Laine’s tournament also ended, of course, the tournament of three of his Jets teammates — North America’s Mark Scheifele, Jacob Trouba and Connor Hellebuyck.

Fellow Jets teammates Blake Wheeler and Dustin Byfuglien of Team USA and Ondrej Pavelec of the Czech Republic also saw their tournament end in a meaningless game between the two teams Thursday night.

All seven Jets players who were on World Cup rosters are now done and are expected to report to Jets training camp — which opens Friday — in the coming days.

Jets head coach Paul Maurice is the only remaining straggler — Maurice is an assistant coach on Team Europe, which plays Sweden Sunday in the weekend’s other semifinal.

The general consensus is every player who took part in this World Cup will be laps ahead of their teammates as training camps open. Scheifele, who spent most of the past week playing with Connor McDavid and Matthews on arguably the most exciting line in Canada, said every player on a World Cup roster is better for the experience.

“You’re playing hockey against the best players in the world — that’s only going to make you better and gain you experience,” Scheifele told me this week. “And that’s especially true for a young guy like Patrik.

“This event was definitely big for our (Jets) team and hopefully everyone can come out firing at the start of the season.”

It would have been fun, of course, to have watched a few Jets players in action here this weekend as the hockey gets really interesting. But a full complement of players for the opening weekend of training camp isn’t the worst thing either for a Jets team that, let’s face it, has a lot of work to do before the season starts.

And it’s also too bad, of course, that an electrifying young North America team will now disband without giving this country what would have been a tantalizing weekend treat — a sudden-death Canada-North America semifinal.

But that’s just being greedy. When your biggest problem as a sports fan in this country is that you have to watch Canada play Russia instead, hey things are going pretty good.

Hockey’s back and so is this country.

Sunny ways, indeed.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek