Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Olli Jokinen Jersey Card

One funny story so far in the non-season is the one where a few Winnipeg Jets players rented the team's practice facility for a scrimmage but ended up, uh, locked out because they forgot the key in the locker room.

One of those players was free agency pick-up Olli Jokinen, seen here sporting the Florida Panthers' white (home) uniform on a card (#J-OJ) from Upper Deck's 2005-06 Black Diamond set which features a black swatch, probably from the away uniform, from the Black Diamond Jersey sub-set.

Once the Panthers' captain, Jokinen was poised to succeed Saku Koivu as the perennial captain for Team Finland, but erratic performances and dramatically diminishing points performances have rendered him more of a second-to-third-liner who can add points on the powerplay.

In the Finnish league, however, prior to coming over to the NHL, he was a superstar, taking with him 9 international tournament medals, the Jari Kurri Trophy as playoff MVP (an award also won by the likes of Koivu, Miikka Kiprusoff, Kari Lehtonen, and Niklas Backstrom), the Matti Keinonen Trophy for best plus/minus rating, and the Jarmo Wasama Trophy as rookie of the year (also won over the years by Petri Skriko, Jani Hurme, Antero Niittymaki, and Mikael Granlund).

I guess you can say he's kind of a big deal.

In parts of 14 NHL seasons, he's played in over 1000 regular-season games, scored nearly 300 goals and assisted on almost 400 more, but has only played in 6 playoff games, though. Playing for the Jets probably won't help improve that statistic.

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