Somewhere around here they could live, the Moomins, those squishy little fellows, half marshmallow, half pygmy hippopotamus, who all you know are that they call their home in an idyllic valley somewhere in Finland.
In Tampere, one of the two venues for this year’s Ice Hockey World Championship alongside Riga, there is a museum where you can find out almost everything about these troll-like children’s book creatures, which are also known in Germany. What is not revealed: where exactly this idyll is located. Maybe behind the team hotel of the German team. There, at Pyhäjärvi, the “holy lake”, one of Tampere’s two large bodies of water, someone has painted a paradise in the landscape. When the national players need fresh air, like on Sunday after the first two games against Sweden (0:1) and Finland (3:4), they walk along a tree-lined shore, gentle bathing bays, tennis courts and mini golf courses. Not only as a Moomin could you feel at home here.
Three goals against a super defensive team wasn’t enough
Even for a full-grown Moomin, whose height usually does not exceed 50 centimeters, Nico Sturm is clearly too tall at 1.91 meters. But his sporty home is not so much the sun-drenched Finnish early summer with 20 degrees at the bathing lake; a more appropriate metaphor would be Tampere’s nickname “Manchester of the North”, a place where work comes before play.
If you want to know where Nico Sturm’s sporty Moomin Valley is, you can go down to level zero of the Nokia Arena, for example. Here, deep below the playing field, is the training hall where the German team is preparing for the game against the USA on Sunday afternoon (Monday, 3.20 p.m./Sport1 and Magentasport), literally in deep seclusion. An environment that the Augsburg storm loves, this “camp feeling”, as he says: “You come together and concentrate on the essentials.”
The essentials worked in the first two games – and somehow didn’t. “We played great again, were more than equal and deserved points,” said the San Jose Sharks forward after the 3-4 win against the defending champion and Olympic champion Finland. But: “I don’t know what we should do differently. We scored three goals against a super defensive team.” But that wasn’t quite enough in the end. Also because Sturm failed at the score of 2: 1 on the gate linkage. “It’s a game of inches,” said national coach Harold Kreis. “Sometimes the disc goes in, sometimes it doesn’t go in.” centimeter thing.
He is not a player for statistics, says Sturm. “I don’t need to have a scorer point in every game. And it wasn’t a bad game if I wasn’t on the score sheet.” Still, he might have traded one or two of his 14 NHL goals this season for a 3-1 win against Finland. Sturm was as frustrated as any of his teammates on Saturday night. It is all the more important to “stay true” to yourself and your own game. It’s his creed.
The Stanley Cup victory gives him the necessary composure
Sturm is the most unusual of the eight German World Cup debutants: NHL professional, Stanley Cup winner, but until recently without an international match. He never played in the German Ice Hockey League. As a junior, he moved to the USA to combine sport and studies. For the DEL he was not considered good enough. In the United States, he struggled through the lower classes, drew attention to himself in the NCAA college league – and suddenly made his NHL debut at 24 for the Minnesota Wild.
“He worked hard to become an NHL staple,” said Leon Draisaitl, the Edmonton Oilers star gifted with prodigious talent. Sturm has been a fixture in the NHL at least since winning the 2022 Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche – something he even has ahead of Draisaitl. “The Stanley Cup gives me peace of mind,” says Sturm. “Not in the sense of satisfaction. But now I have more vision of things when things don’t go well.” That and a three-year contract in San Jose worth two million dollars a year, because he no longer has to think about his sporting future every day.
The fact that he didn’t celebrate his World Cup premiere until he was 28 was also due to the fact that he either played playoffs in America or had to write his theses and didn’t have time for a World Cup. “I don’t like doing half-baked things,” says Sturm. “I knew that someday the time would come.”
He now wants to exemplify this self-restraint with the national team, especially now, after the two narrow defeats. As an NHL player, he should “naturally” be a leader. But he doesn’t have to be the priority. “I’m not that extroverted. I won’t try to be a player that I’m not because it’ll only hurt myself and the team.” Instead, he continues to work as usual. For Sturm, that means practicing face-offs, his specialty, after every training session. He then crouches low, his torso just above the ice, and waits for the linesman to throw in the disc. Not the most spectacular discipline, but important because every target saves the team time and energy.
On Monday against the USA, Nico Sturm will meet his club coach David Quinn. He will then crouch low again until he is barely taller than a Moomin and work. Like always. Because that’s how he feels most comfortable.
