2026 Olympic men’s hockey team preview: Finland
Finland had almost shed the pesky underdog label. After the nation spent decades as the perennial overachiever in best-on-best tournaments, the Finns’ talent pool had ripened to the point it deserved elite status among the world’s top hockey nations. From Miro Heiskanen to Aleksander Barkov to Mikko Rantanen, the national team oozed star power.
But will the Finns be forced to rewind their identity in Milan for the 2026 Olympics? Barkov, the Finns’ captain and arguably their most important player, will miss the Winter Games while he recovers from a torn ACL and MCL suffered in the first practice of Florida Panthers training camp last September. Without their top-line center and No. 1 shutdown forward, the Finns look much thinner. They also won’t have goal scorer Patrik Laine, working his way back from an abdominal injury, and goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, who sustained a lower-body injury last week.
A shallower roster will thus require more of an all-around team effort – but the Finns have historically fared best when underestimated. They’ve medalled in men’s hockey in six of the past eight Olympics and four of the five Olympics in the NHL participation era. Can the Suomi claw their way to another podium in 2026?
LOOKING BACK TO 2022
With the NHL pulling out of Beijing weeks before the Winter Games due to COVID-19, the tournament was forgettable for most hockey nations. Not Finland, though. The 2022 Winter Games produced the first men’s hockey gold medal in the country’s history. Icing a roster dotted with European pro league stalwarts and former NHLers, the Finns ran the table, going a perfect 6-0. Sakari Manninen led the charge with four goals and seven points in five games, blueliner Mikko Lehtonen was named to the Olympic All-Star team, and goaltender Harri Sateri was unbelievable, posting a .962 save percentage in his five appearances. The Finns fell behind 1-0 to the Russian Olympic Committee team in the first period of the final but rallied for a 2-1 victory with Hannes Bjorninen potting the winner early in the third period. The gold came 70 years after Finland first began participating in men’s hockey at the Olympics.
OFFENSE
Even missing a couple key contributors, Finland brings one of the stronger attacks of the 12-team field to Milan. The forward group includes All-Stars Rantanen and Sebastian Aho, toolsy center Roope Hintz and Stanley Cup champion Artturi Lehkonen. Those four are a decent bet to form the top power play unit along with all-world defenseman Heiskanen. He’ll play a crucial role in pushing the puck up the ice – an element Finland lacked at the 4 Nations Face-Off with Heiskanen missing the event due to injury.
Center Anton Lundell has taken a large step forward this season filing in for Barkov in Florida, and ‘Baby Barkov’ will be asked to do so the same at the Olympics. Teuvo Teravainen and Eeli Tolvanen led Finland in goals and points, respectively, at the 2025 Worlds and can step into scoring-line roles and/or power-play work if needed.
Still, while the Finns’ entire forward group is comprised of NHL talent and thus carries a high floor, it needs Rantanen in particular to help elevate its ceiling. He underwhelmed at the 4 Nations with one goal and no assists in three games last year, but he was also in the midst of a turbulent season in which he was traded twice. He was truly dominant for stretches of the 2024-25 Stanley Cup playoffs with the Dallas Stars, a team loaded with Finnish teammates accompanying him to the Olympics. A comfortable, confident Rantanen is good enough to propel Finland on a medal run. Top-heavy can work if your top players are hot.
DEFENSE
The Finns melted down defensively at the 4 Nations, surrendering a hideous 4.67 goals per game, but horrible goaltending was partially to blame, and there’s reason to believe they’ll be better in their own end this time, even without Barkov.
For one, Heiskanen is on hand to shadow opponents’ top players and, if needed, play close to half of every game. He could play with this frequent Dallas partner in Esa Lindell, and those two alone could handle almost all the hardest matchups. Middle-pair bruiser Niko Mikkola is a back-to-back Stanley Cup champion with the Panthers and has gained a ton of big-game experience over the past couple years, while Nikolas Matinpalo is now a fully established NHLer instead of a relative unknown thrust into high-stakes games like he was at the 4 Nations last year. Rasmus Ristolainen gives Finland another key blueliner who missed last year’s tourney and can function as big, rangy minute muncher. If Heiskanen needs a break, Lehtonen can fill the puck-mover role and brings a winning pedigree as the 2026 team’s lone member of the 2022 gold-medal squad.
The Finns also have plenty of forwards they can trust implicitly on defense, from Lundell to Panthers teammate Eetu Luostarinen to Joel Armia to Kaapo Kakko. This team will be difficult to play against, the big, physical D-corps in particular, and has some strong options available for its penalty kill.
GOALTENDING
What happened? Puck-stopping was supposed to be a strength for Finland at the 4 Nations, but it was an outright disaster. Juuse Saros and Kevin Lankinen surrendered 13 goals on 83 shots against across three games, good for an .843 combined save percentage that wouldn’t have cut it even in the high-flying 1980s. Saros lost the crease to Lankinen after just one game during which Saros got blitzed for six goals on 32 American shots, but the net is still Saros’ to lose in Milan. Finland showed its hand by naming Saros one of its ‘First Six’ selections for the Olympics last June. Saros cemented the job with a redemptive performance at the 2025 Worlds, during which he posted a 1.67 goals-against average and .943 SV% across six games.
Saros brings the highest ceiling on the team as a goalie who has played at an All-Star level more often than not in his career. The problem is that, when you’re one of the pros’ smallest netminders at 5-foot-10 and 179 pounds, the net becomes huge when you do slump, as we saw at the 4 Nations. Lankinen, a seasoned NHL backup/1B, could get tapped for relief duty again if Saros starts cold, while Joonas Korpisalo, replacing the injured Luukkonen, has also been a game-stealer for short spurts at various stages of his career. There’s enough experience here that goaltending should not be a liability for Finland. On paper.
COACHING
Antti Pennanen has been a staple behind various benches in Finnish hockey for close to two decades. He was an assistant coach on the Finnish World Junior squad that won gold on home ice in 2016, with Kasperi Kapanen scoring the winner in overtime. Pennanen took over as the national team coach beginning in September 2023 and helmed the Finnish 4 Nations and World Championship squads last year. He has enjoyed some triumphs as a Liiga coach as well, having won a championship plus coach of the year with HPK in 2018-19.
Pennanen had never coached a team full of NHLers before the 4 Nations, and that experience, even though the results were poor, should help him in Milan. He’s an intelligent, communicative coach who connects well with his players and even moonlights as a therapist.
BURNING QUESTION
Can Finland weaponize its extreme team chemistry?
No team has a larger concentration of players spread across a smaller number of club teams than Finland. The ‘Finnish Five’ of the 2024-25 Dallas Stars – a line of Mikael Gralund, Hintz and Rantanen and the Lindell-Heiskanen pair – returns for the tournament. Rantanen and Lehkonen are former teammates, as are Aho and Teravainen. Lundell and Luostarinen are teammates and were linemates for Florida’s entire 2024-25 Cup run, and Mikkola is their teammate. Saros and Lankinen shared a crease together in Nashville. These are just a handful of the Finns’ NHL-crossover examples. In a short tournament, players with a pre-established shorthand should have an advantage in theory, and the Finns need to find any edge they can exploit to compensate for their injury losses.
PREDICTION
You ogle the Canadian, American and Swedish rosters, you wonder how any nation could even touch them, you sympathize for the Barkovless Finns…but then you look at their lineup and realize how many good NHL players, and star-caliber NHL players, still suit up for them. We shouldn’t fade this team too much. It is still far and away the fourth-best in the field, existing in its own tier, and all it will take is a bounce or slip-up from one of the big dogs for Finland to elbow its way into medal contention the way it has so many times in the past. Set your alarm for the group-stage match against Sweden. The stakes will be enormous; it will be the first major best-on-best Olympic battle between the rivals since they met in the 2014 Sochi semifinal.
FULL ROSTER
GOALTENDERS
Joonas Korpisalo (Boston Bruins)
Kevin Lankinen (Vancouver Canucks)
Juuse Saros (Nashville Predators)
DEFENSEMEN
Miro Heiskanen (Dallas Stars)
Henri Jokiharju (Boston Bruins)
Mikko Lehtonen (ZSC Lions)
Esa Lindell (Dallas Stars)
Olli Maatta (Utah Mammoth)
Nikolas Matinpalo (Ottawa Senators)
Niko Mikkola (Florida Panthers)
Rasmus Ristolainen (Philadelphia Flyers)
FORWARDS
Joel Armia (Los Angeles Kings)
Sebastian Aho (Carolina Hurricanes)
Mikael Granlund (Anaheim Ducks)
Erik Haula (Nashville Predators)
Roope Hintz (Dallas Stars)
Kaapo Kakko (Seattle Kraken)
Oliver Kapanen (Montreal Canadiens)
Joel Kiviranta (Colorado Avalanche)
Artturi Lehkonen (Colorado Avalanche)
Anton Lundell (Florida Panthers)
Eetu Luostarinen (Florida Panthers)
Mikko Rantanen (Dallas Stars)
Teuvo Teravainen (Chicago Blackhawks)
Eeli Tolvanen (Seattle Kraken)
PRELIMINARY ROUND SCHEDULE
Feb. 11 vs. Slovakia: 10:40 a.m. ET
Feb. 13 vs. Sweden: 6:10 a.m. ET
Feb. 14 vs. Italy: 10:40 a.m. ET
_____
POST SPONSORED BY bet365
_____