Pekka Jormakka: The Forward Who Makes a Statement Without Ever Saying a Word

There is a moment, roughly halfway through every match, when the crowd noise drops just enough for the scraping of skate blades to cut through the arena. If you’re watching closely, you’ll notice one player on the visiting team who never looks up at the clock. Pekka Jormakka is too busy choosing his lane. He glides along the half-wall, shoulders squared, eyes locked on the goalie’s glove hand, as if the entire rink has shrunk to the six inches between the puck and the net. It’s the same pre-shot ritual he’s performed since junior hockey in Jyväskylä, and it still makes seasoned defensemen second-guess their gaps.
Finland has produced an assembly line of industrious wingers—players who chip, chase, and cycle until the other team coughs up the puck—but Jormakka has always played like someone who misplaced the playbook and decided to write a new one on the spot. Coaches sometimes describe him as “mercurial,” a polite Nordic way of saying he’ll beat two defenders on a solo rush and then take an ill-timed hooking penalty in the neutral zone. Yet that volatility is precisely what makes him valuable. In a sport increasingly obsessed with systems, he is the controlled chaos that can’t be pre-scouted.
The numbers back it up. During the 2017-18 KHL season with Jokerit, he averaged only 12:17 of ice time but finished second on the team in even-strength goals per sixty minutes. Translation: the puck ended up in the net when he was on the ice, even if he wasn’t always on the ice long enough for statisticians to notice. Fans in Helsinki still talk about the February night he scored twice against CSKA Moscow on consecutive shifts, both goals coming from the same low left circle, both shots identical bar-down lasers. After the second tally, the announcer paused, then laughed into the microphone: “Well, I suppose they know where he likes it now.”
What most viewers miss is the private preparation behind the flair. Teammates say Jormakka travels with a battered green notebook in which he sketches goalie tendencies after every game: how quickly Sergei Bobrovsky seals the post, where Mikko Koskinen leaves the five-hole open on wraparound attempts. The sketches look like architectural blueprints drawn by someone who skipped engineering school. They’re messy, but they work. When he returned to the Liiga with JYP in 2021, he scored on his first shootout attempt of the season—same low blocker side he had diagrammed two weeks earlier against that very goalie in practice. The notebook stayed in his bag, as if the page had already done its job.
Off the ice, he is almost aggressively understated. Reporters who expect the standard athlete clichés get short, polite answers delivered in a quiet baritone. Ask about his highlight-reel goals and he’ll pivot to the linemate who made the breakout pass. Ask about the pass and he’ll praise the equipment manager for sharpening his skates an hour before warm-up. The deflection is so consistent that Finnish journalists have a running joke: if you want to know the weather, ask Jormakka about his scoring slump.
Still, there are glimpses of the fire that drives him. During the 2022 Winter Olympics, Finland’s quarterfinal against Switzerland went to overtime. Jormakka had been stapled to the bench for most of the third period after a neutral-zone turnover. When head coach Jukka Jalonen finally tapped his shoulder, he hopped the boards with the urgency of someone who’d been waiting years, not minutes. Forty-three seconds later, he buried a one-timer from the slot, then slammed the glass so hard the plexiglass wobbled for five full seconds. The normally reserved Finnish broadcast team shouted themselves hoarse. In the post-game press conference, Jormakka gave the usual minimalist credit to the center who threaded the pass. But television cameras caught him alone in the tunnel afterward, gloves still on, eyes closed, whispering something to the ceiling. Whatever he said, it sounded like relief.
Critics point to his size—generously listed at five-foot-ten—and wonder how long a winger who plays like a power forward can survive against the league’s heavier blue-liners. The fairer question might be how long the league can afford to overlook someone who manufactures offense from thin air. At thirty-three, Jormakka is no longer the call-up who once slept in the Jokerit locker room because he couldn’t afford a Helsinki hotel. He’s now the veteran who stays late to help rookies drag the net back to center ice after practice, still refusing to leave until he’s buried five pucks in each top corner.
The paradox is that the more you study him, the less predictable he becomes. You can chart his favorite shooting spots, log every penalty he’s taken, even time his shifts down to the second. Yet every so often—usually when the game is teetering on a knife’s edge—he’ll do something that breaks the spreadsheet. A no-look backhand through a goalie’s legs. A slap shot from an impossible angle that clangs in off the post. A sudden burst of speed that turns a routine dump-in into a breakaway. Analysts scramble to update their models; fans reach for their phones; opposing coaches mutter into their headsets.
That, ultimately, is the point. Modern hockey loves its certainties—Corsi, expected goals, structured breakouts—but Pekka Jormakka survives on the moments that refuse to be quantified. Watch him long enough and you start to believe the game still has room for a player who trusts instinct over data, artistry over architecture. And if the numbers eventually say otherwise, well, he’ll probably just flip the page in that green notebook and draw something new.