Hockey’s forgotten pioneer: Support grows for Göran Stubb as a Hall of Fame builder
Earlier this month, Finnish hockey fans packed the well-appointed Nokia Arena in central Tampere on consecutive nights to watch the Florida Panthers and Dallas Stars play two NHL regular-season games.
There they saw Aleksander Barkov , a Tampere native and the first Finnish-born captain to lift the Stanley Cup, take his spot in the Panthers starting lineup alongside three countrymen: Anton Lundell , from Espoo; Eetu Luostarinen , from Siilinjärvi; and Niko Mikkola , from Kiiminki.
Across the ice, the Stars sent out three Finns of their own in Espoo's Miro Heiskanen , Vantaa's Esa Lindell and Nokia's Roope Hintz .
Included among the other players suiting up for the Panthers and Stars were Americans, Canadians, Swedes, Russians, Czechs and a Latvian.
It was, quite frankly, a typical scene in 2024.
Roughly 30 percent of NHL rosters are composed of players from European countries, and the league takes meaningful games to that continent every season. These were the 45th and 46th NHL games played outside of North America and the 10th and 11th hosted in Finland alone.
But there would have been multiple points during Göran Stubb's remarkable life in hockey where an event like this would have been entirely beyond anyone's imagination.
Finland didn't even have an indoor rink when Stubb became chairman of IFK Helsinki at the age of 26. There wasn't a Finnish-trained NHL player until Matti Hagman became the first to do so with the Boston Bruins just as Stubb was taking over the Finnish Ice Hockey Association as its managing director in 1976. And there was no European scouting service to assist NHL teams in procuring talent from the continent until Stubb created one in 1983, beginning a run that spanned four decades and saw the world's top hockey league completely transformed by the flood of players from overseas.
In fact, had you stepped back and reflected on the evolution of the sport before the puck was dropped on that Nov. 1 Stars-Panthers game at Nokia Arena, you would have seen Stubb's fingerprints everywhere.
It helps explain why there's a growing push to see him inducted as a builder in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Göran Stubb is a Hall of Famer.
He was inducted into the Finnish Hockey Hall of Fame in 1991 and the IIHF Hall of Fame in 2000, both as a builder. The only remaining question is whether he'll complete the hat trick with a call to the Toronto-based Hockey Hall of Fame in 2025 or beyond.
That's proven to be an impossibly high hurdle for any European to clear. Incredibly, no builder originating from that continent has been called to the Hall since 1995, when former IIHF president Günther Sabetzki of Germany was inducted.
There is no clear reason why that's the case, and the Hockey Hall of Fame's selection process is notoriously shrouded in secrecy. Past and present members of the 18-person committee aren't even allowed to reveal the identity of those who have been considered for election. What is known is that a successful candidate needs to garner the support of at least 14 of the 18 votes from the selection committee in a given year.
Evaluating candidates for the builder's category comes with an added layer of complexity because identifying those who have made a significant off-ice contribution to the sport can include such a wide range of possibilities.
In the 2024 class inducted Monday, the builder inductees were Colin Campbell and David Poile — a senior NHL executive who oversaw numerous rule changes and technical innovations, and the longest-tenured general manager in NHL history, respectively.
Builders can also include coaches, officials, broadcasters and administrators whose impact have been felt on a large scale.
When it comes time for the selection committee to gather in June and comb through a list of first-time eligible players for 2025 — including Joe Thornton, Zdeno Chara, Duncan Keith, Brianna Decker and Carey Price, among others — they'll be able to lean on statistical and career benchmarks that can easily be compared to players who came before them.
Those same objective measurements aren't available when considering the case of a builder.
When Stubb established the European Scouting Service in 1983, which essentially ran parallel to what NHL Central Scouting was doing in North America, it was a one-man operation.
Him.
There were only three NHL teams that even had a scout based in Europe at the time: the Edmonton Oilers , Calgary Flames and New York Rangers .
In addition to producing ranking lists of the continent's draft-eligible prospects and providing NHL teams with game reports and statistics — a practice that continues now — Stubb in those early days was essential in helping teams gain a footing in Europe. He helped several find their own scouts on the continent. And when North Americans were making a trip overseas to cover a tournament, he made himself available to assist them with everything from travel bookings to visas to credentials.
Stubb was a trusted adviser with deep industry connections in an era when the world seemed much larger — before the internet and cellphones were available to everyone.
"He had a difficult job, trying to placate a bunch of spoiled and entitled scouts thinking he should be there checking them into the hotel and arranging our travel," said David Conte, who first met Stubb while playing in Finland and went on to have a 40-year career scouting for NHL teams.
"In many respects, he did. He was a great conduit to allowing guys to do the job there. They were probably unlikely to navigate the environments by themselves."
Six years after the European Scouting Service began, Sweden's Mats Sundin became the first European player selected first in the NHL Draft, by the Quebec Nordiques. Three years after that, Roman Hamrlík of Czechia became the second when he went to the Tampa Bay Lightning at No. 1. European-trained players were being selected with increasing frequency across all rounds.
Stubb became such an essential part of the NHL's draft process that he was given his own table on the floor. That would allow team executives to race over to him directly to check on a player's eligibility or seek out another piece of information while making a last-minute decision.
"If there's something that describes my dad, it would be that he's down to earth, he's humble and he's loyal to the max," said Alexander Stubb, the eldest of Stubb's two children and the current president of Finland. "I think that's what a lot of the clubs and the NHL proper knew and understood — that you could always trust him."
By the time Stubb transferred the European Scouting Service to Jukka-Pekka Vuorinen in 2023, the NHL and Europe were as closely tied together as a stick and puck.
Growing up as Göran Stubb's son meant you never knew which hockey superstar might be on the other end of a ringing phone or a knock at the door.
Alexander Stubb recalls Bobby Orr, Igor Larionov and Phil Esposito stopping by his family's "general box-standard apartment block in the suburbs of Helsinki." He liked to race to answer the phone in case it was Bobby Hull or a famous NHL executive on the line looking to speak with his father.
"Of course, all of my friends were gobsmacked when they saw and heard who it was," he said.
Alexander was born in 1968, which was a time of great change in Finnish hockey, driven in part by his father. Göran had been running Helsinki IFK on a volunteer basis since 1961 — taking over the club while it was in a perilous financial position — and helped guide it toward more stable ground with the help of a move to the country's first indoor arena.
That created the conditions where the league could start to cater to professionals, and Göran took advantage by boldly approaching Carl Brewer at breakfast during the 1967 IIHF World Hockey Championship in Vienna with an offer to come to Helsinki as a player/coach. It proved to be a watershed moment. Brewer was a three-time Stanley Cup champion with the Toronto Maple Leafs , and the 1968-69 season he spent with HIFK produced the first of three Finnish league titles during Stubb's tenure and left a lasting impression on the country's broader hockey culture.
"He basically became what I would call the father of modern Finnish ice hockey," Alexander Stubb said of Brewer. "He came and in many ways changed the style of play. IFK, my team, became very physical. He's a big hero here. Actually in all of the teams.
"But of course our arena here in Helsinki, they have the Carl Brewer corners and in the locker room they have a big picture of him."
The business experience Stubb gained with HIFK led him to a job running the Finnish Ice Hockey Association starting in 1976. That was the same year Conte came over to play for Kiekkoreipas Lahti and, while he discovered a country with a deep love of the sport, it hardly looked like the burgeoning hockey superpower it is today.
"I think the real measure of him is the transition of hockey in Finland," said Conte. "When I went there, I think they only had 13 indoor rinks. The second division, they played outdoors a lot of them. When you look at the amount of rinks, the progression of Finnish hockey where they're competitive on the world stage, the amount of players ... he was at the forefront of it."
When it came time for Stubb to work his 39th and final draft in a full-time capacity for the NHL in 2022, he refused any and all attempts to have proceedings at the Bell Centre in Montreal interrupted by a video tribute or special recognition.
He did reluctantly consent to having a luncheon thrown in his honor that week, and the list of attendees included family, scouting colleagues, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and deputy commissioner Bill Daly.
Quietly and with little fanfare, he stepped into semi-retirement. It was representative of how he conducted his business throughout a career that spanned 60 years in the sport.
"My dad is probably the guy who has done most for European hockey, but made the least noise," Alexander Stubb said.
Göran Stubb will turn 90 in March and still watches about 200 games per year.
On his watch and with his help, he's seen the NHL become a significantly more global league that puts a much better product on the ice. He's also seen hockey reach a level of prominence in Finland that's allowed a country of less than six million to punch well above its weight class against much bigger nations on the world stage.
"I know this is about Göran, but frankly it's a little bit more about Finland and his contributions to them, and where they've come from and gone to," Conte said. "The growth of hockey in Finland and his attachment to all of the stages of it, I think, is noteworthy. Probably the most comprehensive of anybody from Finnish hockey. That, to me, is the basis of (his Hall of Fame candidacy).
"Finland needs to be better represented and he should be the representative."
(Top graphic: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic, with photos from Jussi Nukari / Associated Press and Frederick Breedon / )
