09-07-2020, 12:07 PM(This post was last modified: 09-07-2020, 12:08 PM by Allegiant.)
Who is Jari Heikkinen?
If you don’t follow Finnish hockey, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard that name before. Jari Heikkinen has long been considered a decent defensive prospect in Finland, but that’s as far as it ever went. At times throughout his minor hockey career, he has struggled to carve out a spot for himself in the top leagues. Rather than fighting to rise his SHL draft stock, he has found himself instead fighting to just hold down a place on a roster. But, young players are often unpredictable, and this season saw a string of injuries force Heikkinen to play a more significant role for his team — he saw top pairing minutes and even some time on the powerplay for a stretch of seven games, during which time he recorded four assists. That brought his total on the year up to eight.
Now, eight assists (and eight points) in a full season isn’t anything to brag about, especially for a player like Heikkinen. Despite his seeming lack of offense, he has long marketed himself as an offensive player. And certainly, that’s something that he’s had to do, given he’s always been at least a little shaky in his own end. To make matters worse, he’s somewhat undersized, and often unable to effectively take the body. But that low point total is deceptive. For most of the year, Heikkinen has seen play primarily on the bottom pairing, during which time he has rarely seen play alongside his team’s most dangerous forwards — instead, he has been miscast, played as a sort of auxiliary ‘energy’ player. To make matters worse, he didn’t even play all sixty games — instead, he only got play in thirty-six of them, missing a number of games as an off-and-on healthy scratch, before injuries forced the team to play him more consistently.
Importantly, when he did get the chance to play in his element — in tandem with his team’s more skilled players — he flourished. Four assists in seven games won’t break any records, but it does show promise. And for a player of Heikkinen’s age, promise is all you really need. With the right coaching, he might well be able to turn those flashes of offensive talent into something more consistent, and something more bankable. And of course, even if he is able to translate his limited success this season into a more successful campaign this coming year, SHL teams might still be hesitant to pick him — his history is too spotty for him to appear as a safe selection, no matter what he does on the ice.
So, we have a young Finnish prospect with little in the way of recorded success or mainstream attention. It would be rather easy to question what the point of this article is at all.
Well, there’s one thing that hasn’t been mentioned — for all of his noted flaws as a player, Heikkinen has one thing going for him. He’s a phenomenal skater. Indeed, that may be the main reason he’s even claimed a spot in the Finnish league at all: to be an ‘energy’ player, you have to bring energy, and he has it in spades. On virtually every shift, Heikkinen blows past his competition, combining blistering speed with surprisingly nimble maneuvering. Once he gets into the opposing zone, he tends not to be able to do much with the puck — usually relied on to play keep-away to enable a change, or else paired up with the fourth line to kill some time. But all that speed could be put to better use, if Heikkinen is able to develop the rest of his skill-set a little more effectively… and if a team is able to find a better use for him.
That brings us, at long last, to the very point of this article. In a move that has seemingly come as a shock to his teammates and his coaches, Heikkinen has declared that he will enter the SMJHL Entry Draft rather than continue on in the Finnish system. Scouts have been forced to backtrack over old tapes to try to cobble together some sort of scouting report on a player that most either overlooked, or just wrote off entirely. Those reports are going to say a few familiar things — excellent skater, agile, some raw offensive instinct. Undersized, prone to defensive lapses. Scouts will question whether he will be able to adapt to a more physical, North American game. They’ll wonder how he’ll perform on a smaller ice surface, and how his seemingly limited skill-set will stack up in the premier junior league in the world.
In fact, it’s not even a guarantee that Heikkinen will find a team at all.
But that brings us to the point of this article — it’s to say that Heikkinen could be a player to watch. His skating ability alone should help him find at least a niche role in professional hockey, but with the right coaching, those natural talents could be leveraged to turn him into a more deadly weapon than he ever showed in Finland. Is it likely? Probably not. If we’re talking projections, Heikkinen is more than likely going to turn into a bottom pairing junior defenceman. A risk to drop into the later rounds of the SHL Draft, if he even makes it on the board. With a few years development, he might turn into a solid player in one of the European leagues.
But, it’s that outside chance that he develops into an SHL-ready player that makes him interesting. He has all of the gifts he needs to turn into an SHL mainstay, but little indication he has what it takes to actually develop his skill-set. In ten seasons, this article might well look like a waste of space. Heikkinen might just be labouring away at the bottom of a depth chart. But there’s enough promise there that this article can ask one thing of its readers: watch out for Jari Heikkinen.
There just might be a time in the near future where nobody needs to ask the title question: “Who is Jari Heikkinen?”
Allegiant![[Image: GdA0bP3.png]](https://i.imgur.com/GdA0bP3.png)
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![[Image: sIjpJeQ.png]](https://i.imgur.com/sIjpJeQ.png)
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