Whether it was at the 2025 NHL Prospect Games in Frisco, Texas, the start of the Red Wings\u2019 Training Camp in Traverse City, Mich., or their eight-game NHL preseason slate, Finnie worked hard to soak in as much as he could from his more experienced teammates and members of the organization\u2019s player development as well as coaching staffs.<\/p>\n
But Finnie didn\u2019t blend in during that early-fall stretch leading up to the League-wide 5 p.m. ET deadline on Oct. 6, when clubs had to submit their first active rosters of the campaign — the former seventh-round pick (No. 201 overall) in the 2023 NHL Entry Draft proved he belonged.<\/p>\n
Detroit head coach Todd McLellan acknowledged that Finnie\u2019s impact so far this season has obviously been greater than he expected it to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur thoughts were fairly realistic,\u201d McLellan said after Saturday night’s 6-4 win over the St. Louis Blues at Little Caesars Arena. \u201cWe were going to play him, let\u2019s see what ends up happening. We obviously believed in him. We certainly did, but he continues to just push the envelope. We can talk about his points, goals and all that stuff. The blocked shots [in Saturday\u2019s game], the checking skills and abilities that he plays with \u2013 there\u2019s nothing better that a player can have than to be trusted by the coaches and teammates. He has that right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also going into Sunday’s NHL slate, Finnie was averaging 16:15 of ice time, trailing only Beckett Sennecke of the Anaheim Ducks (17:23) for the most among all rookie forwards. What\u2019s more, his 25 hits were the third-most among all NHL first-year skaters, trailing only Chicago Blackhawks forward Colton Dach (37) and fellow Red Wings rookie Michael Brandsegg-Nyg\u00e5rd (28).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whether it was at the 2025 NHL Prospect Games in Frisco, Texas, the start of the Red Wings\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-253846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}