Carolina and Seattle Take the NHL to Helsinki, and Puck Drop Is at Breakfast

The NHL is in Helsinki this week, and the time difference is doing West Coast fans a favor for once. The Carolina Hurricanes and the Seattle Kraken play two regular-season games at Veikkaus Arena, and both of them start in the American morning: 9 a.m. Pacific on Thursday, 10 a.m. Pacific on Saturday. Coffee first. Puck drop second.

These games count. Nothing about the week is an exhibition — the points go into the standings, and the visitors are not easing into anything. Carolina arrive as the defending Stanley Cup champions, 14-3-2 with the best points percentage in the league. Seattle are making the first overseas trip in franchise history. Carolina have been here before: their only other games outside North America were in this same city, in the 2010 NHL Premiere series.

When the games start

Thursday's opener faces off at 7 p.m. in Helsinki — 9 a.m. PT, noon on the East Coast — on Prime Video and NHL Network, with KONG carrying it in Seattle. Saturday's rematch starts at 8 p.m. local, 10 a.m. PT, on the same national feeds, with KING 5 joining KONG in Seattle. Helsinki runs ten hours ahead of Seattle, which is the whole trick of the week: prime time in Finland is breakfast in the Pacific time zone. Veikkaus Arena holds 13,349 for hockey, the biggest indoor building in the country.

Friday is the open practice

There is no game on Friday. Instead, both teams hold an open practice at Veikkaus Arena from 11 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. Helsinki time — a session built for the home crowd, and the math proves it: that window runs 1:00 to 4:15 in the morning Pacific. For Finnish fans who have never seen an NHL roster in person, Friday is the up-close look at the whole traveling show.

Fan Fest takes over Narinkka Square

The league's Fan Fest runs all three days at Narinkka Square downtown, and admission is free. Thursday it goes from 4 p.m. until after the game; Friday, 4 to 9 p.m.; Saturday, from noon until after the game — all Helsinki time, with the league noting the schedule can change. There are watch parties for both games and the Stanley Cup on site for photos, which in a hockey country is less a photo opportunity than a pilgrimage line.

The Finns are coming home

Seven Finnish players are on this trip, and they are the reason the building will sound the way it sounds. Seattle bring four: Kaapo Kakko, Jani Nyman, defenseman Ville Ottavainen and goaltender Nikke Kokko. Carolina bring three: Sebastian Aho, Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Juuso Valimaki. Kakko, from Turku, about a hundred miles northwest of the capital, is the face of the week — tied for second on the Kraken in points — and he has been playing tour guide, organizing the team's off-ice time. "There's a good sauna place where we're going to go as a team," he said. "That's something we're doing for sure."

For Aho, the trip closes a loop: Carolina's last visit to Helsinki came in 2010, when he was thirteen. Now he comes back as the franchise player on a defending champion built around him — and Seattle's Finns get the same homecoming from the other bench, Kokko included, the Turku-born goaltender who grew up watching these weeks on television like everyone else in the building will have.

What the numbers say about the hockey

The stylistic gap is the game. The NHL's EDGE numbers, published Wednesday, have Carolina leading the league in offensive-zone time at 45.4 percent — the Hurricanes live in the other team's end. Seattle sit 27th in the same category at 39.3 percent, a team built to survive its own zone and strike going the other way. Those figures are a season snapshot, not a prediction — but they describe Thursday plainly enough: for long stretches, Seattle's homecoming will be spent defending it.

Two mornings, two games that count, one very loud building. "It's a big sport in Finland," Kakko said this week, "so I hope it's going to be loud." Thirteen thousand Finns, a defending champion and a 9 a.m. alarm — the NHL's week in Helsinki is set up to be exactly that.