Drive to the Net: 'Highly-skilled' Koivunen took giant leaps in Finland

CRANBERRY, Pa. -- Ranking prospects isn't an exact science, especially in hockey.

It's a little easier in baseball, where a team's prospects are confined to minor-league teams in their own system, and MLB puts out annual official rankings for the players in each team's system. No such official list exists in hockey, with a big reason being that it's exceptionally challenging to do. How do you compare a college freshman to a kid playing in the Russian junior league, or a kid already playing professionally in Sweden to a junior player from western Canada?

The result is analysts, fans and bloggers creating their own lists, which is a tall task for any one person, to watch that many leagues with very different styles of play and accurately compare individual players. It's easy to overrate or underrate prospects that way.

Entering this season, various ranking sites had forward Ville Koivunen anywhere from No. 4 to No. 7, and more frequently toward the lower-end of that range. After the Penguins acquired Koivunen from the Hurricanes as part of the Jake Guentzel trade, Kyle Dubas said that the team saw Koivunen as someone that they really liked in the Hurricanes' system.

"In our process here going through this, (Koivunen) was one of their players that we targeted very highly," Dubas said in his March 8 press conference.

It's not difficult to see why. Given the strides Koivunen has made this season, those pre-season prospect rankings are well past being outdated.

Koivunen, 20, was the Hurricanes' second-round pick in 2021. The 6-foot, 172-pound right-handed wing is in his third full season Karpat in the top Finnish league, and he's taken great leaps offensively this year. His offensive output was fairly consistent over his first two seasons, registering 29 points (11 goals, 18 assists) in 53 games in 2021-22, and 28 points (12 goals, 16 assists) in 52 games last season. He shattered his previous career highs this year, amassing 56 points (22 goals, 34 assists) in 59 games this year to rank No. 2 on his team in scoring, a point shy of the team lead. He's been skating on the right side of Karpat's top line as of late.

According to Elite Prospects' Lassi Alanen, Koivunen's 56 points are the most by a 20-year-old player in nearly 30 years in the Finnish league. From the start of December to now, Koivunen leads the entire league in points.

"I got to play with better players a lot this year," Koivunen told me in a phone interview on Friday of his season. "I think I'm a little more faster and have more strength, so I can use my strength more. I can make some plays and get a good scoring touch for other players and me too."

Dubas was impressed with Koivunen going back to his draft year, when Dubas was general manager of the Maple Leafs. He said that since then, Koivunen has "just gotten better and better as the years gone on. He makes such a high impact, highly competitive and highly skilled, which seems to be the mix that fits here best."

Koivunen said that that he'd say his hockey sense, puck-handling and playmaking are some of his strengths. Those hands and that skill stand out in a lot of his highlights, like this shootout winner from last month:

If there's a clear weakness to Koivunen's game, it's his skating. That's often the knock on him in the various ranking lists, and that was self-admittedly the area of his game he needs to work on the most. And because he's well aware of it, he's been making a lot of effort to improve it.

"It's the biggest thing I have to improve," he said. "I've been making a lot of progress, I have been focused on it the past few years. I try to be faster and more explosive. It's better, but I need to improve it still. I work on strength in the summers, once I get more strength that helps to be faster."

Koivunen has some AHL experience already. After Karpat's season ended early last year, he joined the Hurricanes' then-AHL affiliate Chicago Wolves for the remainder of the season. He had a goal and a minus-three rating in 12 regular-season games to finish the year. It was a valuable learning experience for Koivunen, who saw first-hand how important that skating is.

"It's a lot faster game," Koivunen recalled. "It's a lot of north and south, not in (Finland) so much. More battles in the corners and on the walls, that's one thing I need to improve too."

Koivunen said that the adjustment was made a little easier off the ice in Chicago by having some fellow Finns around on the team. Whenever he does make the jump to North America full-time to join Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Koivunen will likely have more of his countrymen around him ... and a very familiar face at that.

Koivunen was teammates and roommates with Joel Blomqvist for his first two seasons with Karpat, until Blomqvist left for North America this season. Koivunen and Blomqvist are close, and talked after the trade went through.

"He's a great guy and a good player," Blomqvist told me of Koivunen after Wilkes-Barre's practice at the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex on Saturday. "I think he will be a good fit here. He's a really, really skilled player. He reads the game well, he can make some pretty sick plays if he needs to. He's just a reliable player."

Koivunen is also currently teammates with Emil Pieniniemi, the defenseman the Penguins selected in the third round of last summer's draft. Pieniniemi, at 19, is in his first season in the top Finnish league and has two goals, four assists and a minus-2 rating in 38 games.

"He's playing pretty good," Koivunen said of Pieniniemi. "He's coming into the league, playing to his own strengths. He's doing good stuff, it's fun to play with him."

Dubas said in his post-trade deadline press conference that he anticipates Koivunen coming to North America full-time next season and pushing for a spot on the NHL roster. But if he needs more time to get acclimated, he would of course go down to Wilkes-Barre to start.

Koivunen may get a stint in Wilkes-Barre this season first. Karpat is entering the quarterfinal round of the Liiga playoffs as the No. 4 seed, having home ice advantage in the best-of-seven round against No. 5-seeded Jukurit. If Karpat has an early exit, that would open the door for Koivunen to join Wilkes-Barre for the rest of the AHL season. Dubas also noted that Koivunen could be in the mix for the Finnish national team at the World Championship, something Koivunen told me Friday was "a possibility."

Whether Koivunen gets to be part of a deep playoff run with Karpat, a World Championship tournament, or an AHL playoff run with Wilkes-Barre this spring, it'll be one more piece of valuable experience to cap off a strong season that should set him up for success going into Pittsburgh's training camp next season.