- Pekka Rinne goes into the Hockey Hall of Fame on Nov. 9 after going 258th in the 2004 draft
- A junior coach in Finland told him to stop wasting everyone’s time and chase the NHL
- Read below for how Mitch Korn and Juuse Saros reshaped his game
Pekka Rinne was on his way to being a very good rec league goalie in Finland. Now he’s headed to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Rinne goes in Nov. 9 alongside Carey Price, Patrice Bergeron, Keith Tkachuk, Cindy Curley and Brian Burke, as we laid out when the Class of 2026 was announced. He turned 44 on Tuesday, and NHL.com’s Dan Rosen put together a profile on how he got there.
The Predators took him 258th overall in the eighth round of the 2004 draft, when he was 21. Rinne talked about how unlikely his path was.
“My story is not the obvious one,” Rinne told NHL.com.
It started in a second-division Finnish junior program. Rinne was 17 when his coach, Harri Hautamaki, sat him down and said he was done coaching him. Rinne recalled what came next.
“You shouldn’t be playing in this league,” Hautamaki told him. “You’ve got to have some drive. You’ve got to reach for your potential. You’ve got to go for it.”
Hautamaki got him a tryout in Espoo, and Karpat in Oulu offered him a junior spot. Rinne said hockey had been a hobby before that. He played Finnish baseball in the summer and skipped offseason training.
The baseball is where his catching glove came from. Mitch Korn, then the Predators’ goalie coach, said Rinne could scoop up low shots like ground balls.
Nashville scout Janne Kekalainen had pointed the team toward him, and the late Ray Shero made the trip to Oulu to watch. Rinne found out he’d been drafted at a Midsummer sauna party at a friend’s cabin, when his agent told him.
The 6-foot-5 Rinne was a wild goalie when he got to Nashville. Korn and later Ben Vanderklok had to calm him down. Former Predators goalie Chris Mason described the change.
“He became a different goalie,” said Mason, who now works as a Predators broadcaster. “He was 6-5 but he used to be crouched so low so he wouldn’t look like he was 6-5. As his career went on he became more upright.”
The results speak for themselves. Rinne took Nashville to the 2017 Stanley Cup Final and won the Vezina Trophy in 2017-18, the year the Predators won the Presidents’ Trophy. He finished with 369 wins and 60 shutouts, and his .917 save percentage is tied for fifth among goalies with 500 games played.
Rinne credits Juuse Saros for helping him keep evolving late in his career. Hall of Fame defenseman Shea Weber also remembered his competitiveness in practice, when Rinne yelled at him to stop going easy on one-timers.
“He yelled, ‘Shoot it for real,'” Weber said.
Nashville made Rinne’s No. 35 the first retired number in franchise history on Feb. 24, 2022. A bronze statue went up outside Bridgestone Arena on March 25, 2023. Watch the ceremony:
Induction weekend runs Nov. 7-9 in Toronto, and the 258th pick gets his banner in the Great Hall.
