Sleza goes Wild

As everyone who follows NHL probably knows, Minnesota Wild and Carolina Hurricanes will start their season in Helsinki with two games. The actual games are played on October 7th and 8th but Wild hold free practice today at the Hartwall Arena. The practice started at noon, so people we're told it would nice if they arrived before that and the doors opened at 11 am. It takes about half an hour drive from my parents' place to the arena so this meant that I had to wake up at 9.30 am ON SUNDAY MORNING and leave a bit after 10.30 am. Oh the things I do for hockey...

Anyways, I'm glad I did go there because it was quite cool. There were lots of kids and they were all excited to see NHL players and especially Finnish NHL players. It was very adorable.

I didn't remember to bring my camera with me so I had to deal with my phone's camera...










I had hoped to see Bäckström in action but happened to choose to sit in the part of arena where the other goalie was. They didn't have names on the jerseys so I'm not sure who it was. Wild's homepage is saying Harding is in IR so I guess it was this Khudobin dude that is listed on the site. He looked quite good so it wasn't it wasn't that bad I missed most of the Bäckström action.

Few more pictures can be found here.