Wings sign Finnish winger Ville Leino
With all of the attention on the Wings trying to sign Swedish player Fabian Brunnstrom, the Wings signing of Finnish star Ville Leino appears to have gone relatively unnoticed. Leino had 77 points in 55 games (28G, 49A) in his last season in the Finnish Elite League. He finished with a +34, second in the league.
The winger signed a one year entry level contract and is competing for a Wings roster spot, not the Griffins.
“I haven’t seen him, but (assistant GM) Jim Nill and our new Finnish scout have seen him and they think he’s a good player,” Holland said. “He wants to come over to North America. He’s got good hockey sense, he’s got skill, he’s got good hands.” …
“If he can’t make the team, we’ll probably send him back to the Finnish League,” Holland said. “I think if has to go down (to Grand Rapids) for a couple weeks to get acclimated, he’ll do that. The plan is he’s coming to North America to try to play in the NHL.”
James Mirtle has a post about Leino up on his blog and he commented about a conversation he had with a Finnish hockey writer:
A couple weeks ago, at the height of the Fabian Brunnstrom madness, I was chatting a bit with Risto Pakarinen, a Finnish hockey writer based out of Stockholm. What I really wanted was a sense of what those who had seen Brunnstrom play thought of him, and where they pegged him as a potential NHL player.
Pakarinen was relatively muted in his praise of the young Swede, but he was keen on another player. Good Finn that he is, Pakarinen wanted to let me know about a countryman named Ville Leino.
“Brunnstrom is not the hottest player around here,” he said. “This guy is.”
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May 16th, 2008 at 2:51 am
[…] all the Fabian Brunnstrom hype surrounding Toronto these days, Behind The Jersey reports that the Wings signed another European winger with a comparable […]