HELSINKI — Patrik Laine has been a public figure in Finland since he was 15 years old. In a country that prides itself on stoic determination and reticence, the mention of his name typically generates one of two responses here: a prideful smile or a roll of the eyes.

The Blue Jackets winger is a certifiable rock star, celebrated by those who love his unique style of play, his flashy clothes and his willingness to speak his mind, but merely tolerated by those who wish he’d tone it down and conform with convention a bit more.

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It’s hard to believe Laine is still just 24 years old given how long he’s been among the NHL’s constellation of stars. And yet he remains more mystique than mystery, given all the stories and documentaries that have chronicled his young life.

Is Laine unique?

“Not really, but everybody makes me look unique,” Laine told The Athletic in a lengthy, wide-ranging recent interview. “I don’t feel any better than anybody else, or any different, but I feel like people want to make me look different.

“I don’t really care, to be honest. It doesn’t bother me. I’m just being myself. Everybody close to me knows who I am, what I’m about, and what I believe in. That’s really all that matters to me.”

There are (at least) three aspects of Laine that are endlessly fascinating, and he was willing to plunge into the origins of all three with The Athletic: his incredible ability to shoot a puck, his outlandish and unpredictable approach to style, and his peculiar personality, which can be jarringly blunt and sarcastic.

Laine will draw plenty of attention over the next several days. The Blue Jackets will leave Helsinki on Thursday for Tampere, Laine’s hometown, where they’ll hold an open practice on Thursday and play games Friday and Saturday versus Colorado in Nokia Arena.

The shot

Laine grew up in Tampere, about a 90-minute drive west of Helsinki. His earliest childhood memories are of him and his father, Harri, playing with hockey sticks on a parking lot near their home.

Within a few years, his days were spent playing with the neighbor kids.

“It was a lot of fun,” Laine said. “It was just street hockey and school all day with my friends. As I grew up, it became more about hockey and less about school and all the other stuff. I had a lot of fun.

“I wish I could go back to those days, not worrying about a thing, just going to play street hockey, being with my friends. That was all we worried about at the time. Your only concern was when we had to go eat.”

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Laine said he spent “so much time” watching YouTube clips of NHL stars Alex Ovechkin and Steven Stamkos, two of the NHL’s both impressive shooters. Then, when he couldn’t get on a rink, he’d head to his backyard and try to apply the little details he noticed with each shooter.

For year-round shooting, he had a large wooden platform with a sheet of plastic or rubber stretched across it and stapled into place. From there, Laine could fire pucks at a net at all hours of the day and in any weather.

“I was shooting hundreds and thousands of pucks every day in our backyard,” Laine said. “My dad would hang empty soda cans in the corners for me to aim at.

“We would always compete — best out of 10 — and whoever lost had to do pushups. It was slapshots and wristers, just depending on what the contest was. It got to the point where I didn’t usually miss. But I would do that for hours, with my dad and by myself.”

When the pop cans were destroyed, Harri Laine would hang old shoes from the corner of the cage for Patti to use as targets.

“I was just having fun scoring,” Laine said. “I wasn’t doing it so I could be here (in the NHL) one day, I was just doing it because it was so much fun to do.”

Laine’s shot started taking him places from a young age, though. When he was 10, he started playing against players two or three years older than him.

“Patty could always blast it,” said Joona Luoto, one of Laine’s lifelong friends, who signed a free-agent contract with the Blue Jackets organization last summer.

But it was in the spring of 2014, after Laine suffered a left knee injury in the playoffs with a Tappara junior club, that his shot became a missile.

Luoto remembers it well.

“He had just had surgery, so he was on crutches,” Luoto said. “We don’t skate much in Finland out of hockey season, so we met at a soccer field for a workout. (Laine) wasn’t expected to be there, because there wasn’t much he could do with his knee.

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“But there he was.”

Luoto recalls Laine casting aside his crutches and hopping around on his right foot to step up pucks before him in a row, then blasting them — “Like, angry,” Luoto said — over and over again. He was picking corners, ringing the post, and going and bar-down on one foot.

“It kinda destroyed the knee,” Laine said. “The meniscus was completely destroyed. One doctor said I might not be able to play again, and that was not a fun thing to hear when you’re 15. The next year was just awful, too. I actually thought about quitting. I just couldn’t move on it.”

But Laine could still shoot, and shoot he did. “The doctors,” he smiled. “I don’t think they knew about this.”

He’d fire hundreds, sometimes thousands of pucks per day, he said. And for those who marvel at Laine’s ability to one-time pucks with tremendous velocity, even if they’re not off perfect passes, it likely dates back to those drills he took with one foot, where he was quite literally always off balance to avoid re-injuring the knee.

It was about this time that Laine started to draw attention across Finland. He stopped attending school after 10th grade — that’s allowed in Finland, with a parent’s permission — and began to focus specifically on hockey.

When he was 16, he made his debut in Liiga, Finland’s top league. The following season, he helped lead Tappara to a Liiga championship, scoring 10 goals in 18 playoff games — perfect timing, with the NHL Draft just months away.

“I’ve always known I could shoot,” Laine said. “I was always playing with guys three or four years older than me, and I could see that (I) was scoring and shooting pretty well against them. But that’s still within Finland, right?

“You have no idea what guys are doing in North America, how good the players are here. But within Finland I knew I had a pretty good shot.”

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Winnipeg drafted him with the No. 2 pick later that summer and he went straight to the NHL. Since the beginning of his rookie season, Laine has scored 177 goals, the 15th most in the league.

The style

Laine made a rather startling self-observation: “I think I was, like, 15 years old when I wore jeans for the first time.” Most of his teen years, he said, were spent wearing the team-issued sweats and tracksuits from the Tappara club in Tampere.

Now, Laine is one of the NHL’s more adventurous dressers, stretching the boundaries of the league’s dress policy. Yes, it’s in the league’s collective bargaining agreement that players must wear suits to their team’s game or while traveling unless given a pass by their GM.

A purple iridescent silk suit? Sure. A crushed velvet royal blue sport coat with black lapels and a royal blue fedora? Absolutely.

Patty arriving in ✨ style ✨@Nationwide | #CBJ pic.twitter.com/jgC5AzF47e

— Columbus Blue Jackets (@BlueJacketsNHL) October 28, 2022

“Some guys think it’s great, and some guys think it’s ridiculous,” Laine said. “But I like it. That’s all that really matters. You dress up within the rules and the guidelines we have.

“When I came into the league, it was nothing flashy, nothing crazy. I think it’s going in the right direction. Guys are showing their personalities, but it’s mostly in the other sports — NFL, NBA, MLB — where you’re seeing some of the crazier stuff.”

Laine said he started admiring the style of NBA players a few years ago, specifically 10-time All-Star James Harden.

“Last year, we did a bomber jacket and styled it up as a suit,” said Ethan Weisman, who owns and operates Pantheon Custom Clothiers in Columbus. “Probably the first time in NHL history that somebody wore a bomber jacket instead of a suit coat.”

Weisman has a list of clients that is the envy of most tailors. In Hollywood circles, that’s Jamie Foxx, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Beyonce. In the sports world, that’s hockey style icon Henrik Lundqvist, Ezekiel Elliott, Amari Cooper and scores of other NFL players.

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Laine and Weisman began working together shortly after Laine was traded to the Blue Jackets in early 2021.

“The NFL guys don’t have the regulations on what they can wear, so they’re known to be a little more flashy,” Weisman said. “But Patrik is a stand-alone in the NHL. He’s really more like the NBA guys.”

Fresh 😎@Nationwide | #CBJ https://t.co/ksBcmjMqDj pic.twitter.com/Rb6goNqdCO

— Columbus Blue Jackets (@BlueJacketsNHL) October 25, 2022

Laine, who is 6-foot-5, has a unique build, Weisman said. “Small waist, broad shoulders, hockey backside … everything’s proportioned a little differently.”

When asked to define his style, even broadly, Weisman chuckled.

“I just call it ‘Laine’ or ‘Patty,'” Weisman said, “because there’s no other way to describe it. I’m not sure there’s a theme, really.

“He’ll come at me with ideas. We’ll make something crazy out of silk, almost pajama-style, and he’ll want to wear a fedora with it. He has ideas all over the place, stuff I might not even think looks good, but then I’ll see the picture and be like, ‘OK, that looks good.’ He’s the only guy, maybe, who could pull that off.”

Laine could probably land a solid endorsement deal out of all of this but has no interest in it. He doesn’t shop at any specific stores and doesn’t want to be limited to any one designer, he said. Much of what he purchases is online because he hates to shop.

But the major pieces are all done with Weisman.

“A lot of guys like it simple — plain colors that don’t stick out much,” Laine said. “And that’s fine. I actually think that looks good, too.

“It doesn’t matter what you wear. If you wear it with confidence, it’s going to look good.”

The NHL season in in full swing, and with it comes style rankings from @InstantRHIplay:

◽️ Suede suits
◽️ Dapper gents
◽️ Plaid trench coats

And we'll let Patrik Laine's chameleon ensemble do the talking…https://t.co/uegs7pf9WD pic.twitter.com/zBjcqNwFlq

— The Athletic NHL (@TheAthleticNHL) October 31, 2022

The self

For many NHL fans, their first exposure to Laine was just before the NHL Draft Lottery in 2016, when he was considered a longshot candidate to challenge Auston Matthews as the No. 1 pick. It’s usually a situation where a young player tries to put their best foot forward, look the part of a top pick and say all the right things.

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Laine, though, took the call while he was still lying down in bed, which humored some and rankled others. In his defense, it was nearly 3 a.m. in Finland.

“I was just doing what I was doing, and I remembered I had the call,” Laine said. “I wasn’t going to dress up and set up everything. It was just natural. That’s who I was, and that’s who I am. I’ll do my thing, and if somebody’s not going to like it, that’s their issue. I’m just being myself. That’s everybody’s right.”

That’s not an attitude that most from Finland would espouse. For that matter, it’s not a typical approach in the NHL, either, where individuality and outspokenness are often frowned upon in a dressing room setting.

“Yeah, I’ve had issues with that,” Laine said. “For being myself, for being too honest sometimes. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I’ve never made excuses. I’m straight up. I say how I feel about things. I can’t remember who said this, but it’s a saying I heard once and I really liked: ‘Truth is like poetry, and most people hate poetry.’

“I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I didn’t do certain things, and you have to learn from those mistakes. You can be yourself within the limits, as long as it’s not harming anybody or being rude to anybody or anything like that.”

Laine carries himself with a presence within the Blue Jackets’ dressing room, but he’s not a big talker or a rah-rah, he said. He’s actually pretty quiet.

When he first arrived after the trade from Winnipeg early in the 2020-21 season, there was concern that Laine may have trouble fitting into the Blue Jackets’ tight-knit locker room. It didn’t help that he had a rough first season with the Blue Jackets under previous coach John Tortorella.

It started to change on the ice at the start of last season, and Laine began to fully integrate into the dressing room later last season under difficult circumstances.

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Harri Laine died unexpectedly on Nov. 21, 2021. Laine was out of the lineup at the time with an oblique injury, but he headed home to Finland for the funeral. The two were extremely close. Harri would stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning in Finland to watch Laine’s games back in North America.

“I don’t think anything can replace that,” Laine said. “I don’t think anything could.”

Laine’s longtime girlfriend, Sanna Mari Kiukas, was a major source of strength, Laine said. But he also learned to lean on his Blue Jackets teammates, too, and it’s pulled him closer into this group of players than he’s ever felt.

“That’s absolutely true,” said Laine, who signed a four-year, $34.8 million contract with the Blue Jackets over the summer. “Right after the funeral, I left (Finland) the next day, even though I knew I wasn’t ready to play. I just felt I needed to get back here. Not to take it off my mind or bury my thoughts, it was just comfortable being here in Columbus and I felt I needed to be here.

“This group is great. It made it a little bit easier. Not a lot easier, because there’s nothing anybody can do in that situation. But a little bit, and that seems like a lot at the time.

“If you’re hating coming to the rink, it’s going to be miserable. That’s never been the case here. We’ve had tough times on the ice, but I still have a smile coming to the rink to work with the guys we have here.”

(Top photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)

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