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TAMPERE, Finland — Like many of the conversations during my stay in Finland, this one flew right over my head.

Roope Hintz stepped up to the cashier, ordered something in Finnish, paid and started walking toward the coffee bar in the lobby of the Holiday Club Tampere Spa. Naturally I followed him in line, said hello in English – my dead giveaway that I don’t speak Finnish – and started to ask for a coffee.

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That’s when the cashier gave me a strange look, and Hintz shuffled back in our direction.

C’mon, he motioned. He’d already bought two cups of coffee and certainly didn’t plan on drinking both by himself.

Awkwardness avoided, Hintz and I prepare our coffee before grabbing a seat in the hotel lobby. His includes cream; I take mine black. We had originally planned on grabbing coffee at Lapinniemen Ansari, which shares a parking lot with this hotel, but it’s 11:30 a.m. on a Monday and the restaurant doesn’t open until noon.

Hintz asks about my trip in and the 90-minute drive up from Helsinki to his hometown of Tampere. He’s well-versed in the route: Hintz keeps an apartment in both cities, splitting time between Tampere and the Finnish capital each offseason. Later this week, he’ll skate in Helsinki with a handful of NHL players, including Stars teammates Esa Lindell and Miro Heiskanen.

“It’s an easy drive, it’s just straight back and forth,” Hintz says. “Easy.”

Hintz is hoping to make the Dallas Stars’ lives easier this year when they open the season on Thursday against the Boston Bruins. Hintz played 58 NHL games last season and an additional 13 in the playoffs, but really hit his stride and turned into a game-breaker around the NHL trade deadline.

After posting 11 points in the first five months of the season, which included quite a few trips to the AHL, Hintz tallied 19 points in 27 combined regular season and playoff games after March 12. In the playoffs, he became a revelation truly unveiled to the world, putting the Nashville Predators and St. Louis Blues on their heels while scoring five times.

But by early August, Hintz took his foot off the pedal. He’s relaxed and enjoying what’s left of the offseason. He’s made the most of the time off. He took a trip to Spain a few months ago, then sojourned to Stockholm last month with his brother and two friends to catch a Bon Jovi concert.

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The trip to Spain was strategically planned around Hintz’ recovery from a broken foot that he played through in Game 7 against the Blues. He suffered the injury blocking a shot in Game 6; he doesn’t remember who took the shot, but looking back, he’s surprised it broke a bone.

“I took and blocked many shots with my feet that were slap shots, and that was just a wrist shot,” Hintz said. “Maybe it was just all the times piling up. Maybe that’s what happened.”

Maybe is a frequent part of Hintz’ speech pattern in English. Much like Miro Heiskanen, says, “Oh, I don’t know,” or many Canadians use, “Yeah, no, for sure,” it’s a modifier that doesn’t hold much meaning – just like you might add an “umm” or mumble when speaking.

You start to notice a player’s cadence and vocal habits when you spend time around them, and I’ve learned a good amount about Hintz since he played his first AHL game with the Texas Stars during the 2017-18 season. But I haven’t gotten to know Hintz that well as a human, and that’s the mission as we grab coffee in his hometown.

Hintz was born in Tampere, but first grew up and learned to skate in Nokia, a 20-minute drive east of the city. He was a multi-sport athlete growing up, playing organized basketball, soccer and hockey.

Hintz and his friends also grew up playing Pesäpallo, Finland’s chaotic equivalent to baseball. He starts to map out the field on the coffee table in front of us, using his coffee cup as the home base area where the pitcher stands next to the batter and throws the ball straight into the air.

“You hit it and then you run here,” Hintz says drawing a short line with his finger. “I know in baseball, you run the other way to start.”

He continues to draw the path on the table, illustrating how a hitter will run out of the batter’s box to his left, then turn and run at a 90-degree angle to his right for second base. From there, the runner will cross horizontally to third before taking a somewhat circular path around first base to get home.

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Google or YouTube it – it still probably won’t make sense if you grew up with baseball’s rigorous diamond approach.

“It was a good game to play as kids because there we so many people on the field,” Hintz said. “Lots of action. It’s exciting.”

Hintz has been to a few baseball games in his life, enough to where he’s starting to understand it. He also made a similar comment to one I’ve heard before from Europeans who are introduced to the sport.

“They play a lot of games,” Hintz said.

One hundred and sixty-two.

“Do they practice? Can they practice?” Hintz asked.

I explain baseball’s spring training regimen, which also consists of more games. The Texas Rangers, for example, played 36 spring training games.

“That’s wild,” Hintz said. “You’d think practice would help you in a game.”

Hintz’ parents, Marika and Kai, both played basketball growing up, which could have been the family legacy. But Roope wanted to follow the path of his brother, Miiko, who is four years older and recently retired after playing six years professionally in Finland.

“I was my best at hockey, and I liked that the most,” Hintz said. “Plus it was what my brother did, so it made it an easy decision. I still played soccer for a little bit longer, but soon it was just hockey.”

And that makes sense for kid from Tampere, where the Hintz family moved around his 10th birthday.

Tampere is the hockey capital of Finland. It’s the only Finnish city that houses two teams in the country’s top league, Liiga, and those teams share a home in Finland’s oldest indoor ice arena, the Tampereen jäähalli – or, in English, Tampere Ice Stadium – which was built in 1965.

The arena is split down the middle. The two locker rooms face each other, while the team offices are right down the hall from one other. Banners with championships and retired numbers for both Ilves and Tappara face each other in a permanent staring contest, providing a constant reminder that the stadium is literally a house divided.

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The rivalry starts at a young age, and fandom is often dictated by which youth program you grew up in. Across Finland, the club teams nurture and grow hockey at the youth level. They have teams for each age group and develop a culture in which those in the community feel like they are a part of the club by either having played themselves or through a close family member who’s suited up for Ilves or Tappara at some level.

Hintz grew up in the Ilves system, eventually playing parts of two seasons with the top team as a teenager.

“That’s when I realized that maybe you could make it and maybe there is something more,” Hintz said. “That, and getting invited to the national team camp. That’s when maybe you know you can do something and it could be your job.”

Hintz says he always wanted to reach the NHL – it was a dream. But the first goal was to play for Ilves, particularly in the rivalry games against Tappara. To Hintz, the NHL wasn’t really tangible growing up in Finland. There would be the occasional prime time game on TV, the ones that start on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon locally, and there was a highlight show in the morning. Aside from that, though, the NHL was a distant concept.

That changes when an NHL team calls your name at the draft, like the Stars did for Hintz in 2015’s second round. All of a sudden, he became a candidate to be featured in future morning highlight shows, a dream actualized four years later in this Spring’s Blues series.

Because of his physical tools, the 6’3, 215-pound Hintz is like a locomotive on ice. Speed is a big part of his game, and human beings his size simply aren’t supposed to be that fast. It isn’t fair.

But it’s his skill while zooming around at high speeds that truly makes Hintz a bona fide, top-line talent and potential future superstar. (Ben Bishop backs that last part up.)Looking at the Stars roster, there are several speedsters who don’t have the hands to match their feet. Meanwhile, there are also players with immaculate skill who look like they are skating through sand. Hintz is the rare combination where the hands match the feet, and he can turn a small opening into a big moment.

That’s what shone through in the St. Louis series. There was both a social media reaction and traditional media reaction to Hintz’ performance along the lines of “Who is this funny-named Finn?”

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“That’s like that happened when he first played for the national team,” said Lauri Marjamäki said, head coach of Jokerit in the KHL and, prior to that, the head coach of the Finnish national team. “It was like, fuck, who is this kid?”

Now, people are finding out. In fact, during my week-long trip to Finland, Hintz’ name came up more often than any of the other Stars, past or prior. Plenty of Finns raved about Miro Heiskanen, but Heiskanen was a known commodity in his home country. There really wasn’t a surprise he was that good as a 19-year-old.

Hintz, however, was the surprise player that some Finns knew about but others have only now pinned high hopes to. The Stars were already an intriguing watch for Finns because of Heiskanen and to a lesser extent Esa Lindell. But the St. Louis series offered the hope that Dallas also had that Finnish flair at forward, which Hintz hopes to carry over into this season.

“He’s the one that will get you out of your seat in a moment, the one that is going to make you stand up,” Lauri Korpikoski, a former Stars player still playing in Finland, told me later in the week. “Finns like the Stars. They also like star players. He could be a star for the Stars.”

And it’s turning into a golden age for Finnish hockey. The star power has been turned up in recent years, and the depth of the hockey program was on display this past spring, when Finland won the IIHF World Championships with little help from NHL players.

“That was really nice to see. The entire country was watching,” Hintz said. “That’s a big deal. It’s a big deal for Finnish hockey, it’s a big deal for those guys.”

I ask Hintz what he thinks about his own future with the Finnish National Team. Not the World Championships, which he could only play in if Dallas’ season ended prematurely, but in the next true best-on-best international tournament, whether that’s the World Cup of Hockey or the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, should the NHL elect to take a break for the tournament.

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“I don’t know,” Hintz said. “It’s hard to say. But I would love to be part of it. But I have no idea.”

I surmise that Hintz would be a nice fit as middle-six center or winger for the Finn’s optimal lineup, and if he builds on last season he’s probably on the right track.

“I hope so.”

Our conversation turns to Stars coach Jim Montgomery, whom Hintz credits for elevating his game in late this past season. Hintz likes how Montgomery is a teacher; he likes his approach to the game and he likes how Montgomery gives direction while also making it clear to Hintz that he wanted the forward to use his creativity whenever possible. Montgomery prizes creative minds on the puck. He didn’t have enough of them last season, though, and Hintz is part of the coach’s long-term plan to make the Stars a better puck-possession team.

“I think it’s something he’s always been able to have, but mentally he had to believe he could do it at the highest level,” Montgomery said. “But also, his creativity, his ability to make plays with the puck – I think it’s only going to get better and better. Same thing with his finishing. As he continues to rise, you can look at so many players. Now his challenge is, ‘Can I do it for 82 games?'”

The discussion shifts to Hintz’ tattoos, a collection that’s grown during the offseason. His right arm is now engulfed in a full sleeve featuring a scorpion and a skull. He plans to get more, possibly including a complete sleeve on the left — where he has his original tattoo on his forearm, a trio of playing cards that spell out his birthday.

That first tattoo is how Hintz got his public nickname, the Ace of Spades, from former Texas Stars goalie Mike McKenna during the 2017-18 season. It’s a nickname that really stayed in the locker room in Cedar Park, but became public when in-arena DJ Michael Gruber started playing Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” after the Finn scored last season. When the Stars were putting out offseason phone wallpapers, Hintz’ featured him on a playing card in front of the ace of spades.

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“That’s Mike’s thing,” Hintz says with a laugh.

At this point, the interview starts to devolve, or evolve, into a full-blown conversation. Hintz and I discuss summer vacations and trips we’ve taken. His experience at the Bon Jovi concert brings up a natural discussion about music choices – he’s a fan of Finnish rap, and he tells me of his plan to attend the Tampere Music Festival with Miro Heiskanen the following weekend.

Hintz isn’t an avid golfer, but he improved his game a bit during the offseason, and more recently started playing Padel, a racquet sport that looks like a combination of tennis and racquetball. It’s a sport he says that should help with eye-hand coordination (and based on the YouTube clips, it looks rather fun).

It’s getting close to 1 p.m., and Hintz has to get to a workout. Before letting him go, I thank him for the coffee and ask about any must-see suggestions he has for my remaining time in Tampere. He suggests checking out the Pyynikki observation tower and its 360-degree view of the city and surrounding lakes.

“Plus they have a cafe where you can get donuts and coffee,” he adds.

He’s right. The donuts were worth the trip.

Top photo courtesy of Sean Shapiro

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