The first thing you need to know about Jake Virtanen is that you have been pronouncing his name wrong.
It’s not Ver-TAN-en, which rhymes with “cannon.” It’s VIRT-in-in, which sounds more like “herd ‘em in.”
But when Virtanen’s paternal grandparents arrived from Vancouver, B.C. from Finland in 1967, they feared no one would be able to say their name. So they Anglicised it and many years later no one bothered to change it back.
“The Finnish people, they don’t like the way we pronounce the name in Canada,” said Virtanen’s dad, Rainer.
It’s not the only thing that Finnish hockey fans will find annoying about Virtanen over the next two weeks.