We ended up in a face-off wormhole on Monday and now you have to (or get to…) come with us.
With the Detroit Red Wings currently missing their top-two centers, Dylan Larkin and Andrew Copp, they are having to rely more heavily on 20-year-old Emmitt Finnie, and moved the rookie forward to center, his natural position, after he’s spent most of the season on the wing.
And face-offs, to put it bluntly, have been rough for Finnie at the NHL level. Against the Calgary Flames on Monday, he took 13 draws and only won five.
This naturally led to some further discussion with other centers in Detroit, including Marco Kasper, who in his second NHL season has improved his face-off percentage from 44.9 to 49.7 percent.
In that discussion about face-offs Kasper, unprompted, brought up the work of Dallas Stars rookie center Arttu Hyry, whom according to Kasper was one of the better centers he battled in one-on-one in draws on the weakside.
I guess you could call it kismet, but around the same time this conversation was happening in Detroit, maybe even the exact same time, Hyry was discussing his face-off approach in Dallas.
Hyry made his NHL debut in January 2025. In his first career NHL game, he went 6-for-6 on faceoffs, but the Stars’ forward roster under Pete DeBoer was a crowded one, and as a result, Hyry would only take 10 more draws before he was sent back to the AHL for the rest of the season.
But as it turned out, his 69% faceoff winning percentage in those five games (11-for-16) was a very real clue about what Hyry would be able to do when given a longer run. This year, Hyry’s arrival has been similarly dominant on the dot, as he’s averaged 11 faceoffs per game at a 59% win rate—tied with Roope Hintz for the team lead.
So, how has a 24-year-old undrafted rookie come into the league and won 52 of 88 faceoffs over the course of eight games? It’s taken a whole lot of work, in Hyry’s opinion.
