Ok, here we go.
Vehvilainen at midseason-ish with my take on him;
''
After stealing the #1 spot from Jussi Rynnäs he has been lights out along with the team.
He has an impressive 93,87%SV along with a stunning 1.53 GA. He also has won 80,43% of games he's started. 4 shutouts which is the most in the league.
He leads every goaltending metric in FEL, and despite his awful WJC appearance, he has been head and shoulders better than Kaapo Kähkönen, who was the winning goalie in the WJC semifinal and the final.
Kähkönen hasn't played badly either, being #2 in SV% and #3 in GA, it's just that Veini has a huge lead on every goalie.
One knock on him is that he's gotten the 10th most shots in the league. He has gotten 235 shots less than Kähkönen.
All this after he went undrafted, and he was essentially abandoned by his former team as well, given how he didn't perform well in the playoffs and at times in the regular season.
Might be a solid pick in the later rounds of the draft next year.''
My general observations on him are that his horizontal movement needs some work, along with his reactiveness all around. Long shots seem to beat him a lot, but he made up for those 'weak' goals with his overall amazing and steady mindset, the whole playoffs it was relaxing to think that Vehviläinen will just catch everything, he had that aura around him. He was on fire for a long stretch in the regular season but took a little bit of a hit going into the playoffs with him having a mini-slump which saw Rynnäs starting the playoffs (and Rynnäs failing once again).
The rest is pretty promising towards an NHL career.
My take on him after the finals;
''Ari Hilli, his goalie coach, has been lauded as a 'peoples coach' like Manner, the head coach. Hilli helped springboard Bäckström, Rinne, and Tarkki (a former, popular Kärpät goalie) to their respective careers.
Vehviläinen surely has gotten the support of the team and the coaches on his side and it's rare for us to win a championship without having a goalie roulette nowadays, he stood still and took the #1 goalie spot as soon as Rynnäs screwed up against Ässät in the 3rd game of the playoffs and never looked back.
He was the definition of solid but I think he can still work on his positioning and awareness.
Some goals he let in were bad judgment calls in the regular season and in the series against IFK and in the Finals he got beat by some long-range shots which obviously could have been caught on his best day. That aside, he probably was the reason we won the championship since he caught all the ones that mattered. His stats were stellar for the playoffs.
11 wins and 4 losses with 3 shutouts. A 93,33 svs%, 1.57 GAA. Solid. Real solid.''
Vehvilainen raising the cup with the Captain Lasse Kukkonen;