The NHL has announced a second set of ‘Global Series’ international regular season fixtures for the European market in the 2026-27 campaign, with the Carolina Hurricanes and Seattle Kraken set to head to Finland for a double header.
The fixtures will take place on November 12 and 14 and will be the first of two international excursions for the NHL next season, alongside the recently announced Ottawa Senators and the Chicago Blackhawks double-header in Frankfurt, Germany, in December.
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The games will be staged in the capital of Helsinki at the 13,349-capacity Veikkaus Arena, home of second-tier domestic side Helsingin Jokerit.
This venue has a strong history of staging ice hockey beyond Jokerit fixtures, including NHL Global Series games as recently as 2018.
It has hosted 11 NHL games in all (including regular-season games and pre-season challenge fixtures), with the upcoming global series marking its 12th and 13th times.
This marks the NHL’s return to Finland for the first time since 2024, when the Florida Panthers and Dallas Stars played two regular-season games at Tampere’s Nokia Arena.
As a priority international market for the NHL and one of ice-hockey’s strongest global territories, Finland is one of the best-represented nationalities in the NHL.
In the current 2025-26 campaign, there are close to 50 active Finnish players, including former all-stars Mikko Rantanen and Patrick Laine.
Finland is represented in both participating teams, on the Kraken by forwards Kaapo Kakko, Eeli Tolvanen, and Jani Nyman, while the Hurricanes currently boast both Sebastian Aho and Jesperi Kotkaniemi, and both have numerous other Finnish prospects in their developmental ranks.
In terms of overall NHL growth across Europe, the league opened an office in Switzerland in late 2025 to expand its footprint across the continent.
It also operates its NHL Street Hockey school-based initiative across multiple European markets, such as Germany, Finland, Sweden, Czechia, and the UK.
NHL media rights in the Finnish market are held by streaming service Viaplay via its owner NENT in a deal running through the current season, with distribution yet to be confirmed for the 2026-27 campaign.
Through that agreement, Viaplay covers every NHL game each season, over 1,400 in total, with Finnish streaming service MTV3 also picking up a minor suite of rights.
One potential suitor for the rights over embattled Viaplay could be commercial network Nelonen, which acquired the rights to the NHL-organized 4 Nations Face-Off national team competition in 2025, although perhaps the cost of an NHL package may be too high.
Additionally, Finnish viewers can also watch the NHL through the league’s in-house direct-to-consumer service NHL.TV, which is now distributed globally by streaming service DAZN worldwide.
