Anton Lundell was 10 years old, but still he remembers it so clearly.
Mikael Granlund swinging behind the Russia goal, heading for its right side. In the process, the center, then only 19 years old on May 13, 2011, put the puck on his blade and flung it behind Russia’s goalie, Konstantin Barulin. He scored.
“He did that lacrosse move in 2011, which went viral,” Lundell, the Florida Panthers center, recently told the “NHL @TheRink” podcast of the goal from Finland’s semifinal game in the 2011 World Hockey Championship. “He was one guy I looked up to. Yeah, it’s pretty cool now we get to play on the same team.”
It’s 14 years later, and though Granlund was not the first to score on a “Michigan” -- that honor goes to Mike Legg of the University of Michigan back in 1996 -- he performed the move eight years before Andrei Svechnikov would bring it to the NHL. It was his first try at the World Championship, a tournament looked up to with the veneration of the Super Bowl in Finland. He was impossibly young, still a full season before he would make the jump to the NHL from HIFK of Liiga, the top professional men’s league in Finland.
Granlund, 32, has become a mainstay for Finland on the international stage, a veteran of World Championships, of Olympic teams, of the World Cup of Hockey. He’s now getting set for his latest challenge for his home country, playing for Finland at the 4 Nations Face-Off against the United States, Canada and Sweden in Montreal and Boston from Feb. 12-20, though first his San Jose Sharks are set to visit the Seattle Kraken on Thursday (10:30 p.m. ET; ESPN).