Aho's two-goal homecoming carries Hurricanes past Kraken in Helsinki
Carolina opened the NHL Global Series in Finland with a 4-1 win built on Sebastian Aho's two goals, a failed Seattle challenge and a 12-save night for Brandon Bussi.
Sebastian Aho finally got an NHL game in his home country, and he made it count. The Hurricanes center scored twice in front of a Finnish crowd at Helsinki's Veikkaus Arena on Thursday as Carolina beat the Seattle Kraken 4-1 in the opening game of the 2026 NHL Global Series — a third straight win that pushed the Canes to 15-3-2, with seven wins in their past eight games.
A challenge that backfired
Nikolaj Ehlers opened the scoring midway through the first period with Jackson Blake screening the goaltender. Seattle challenged for goaltender interference, lost, and paid the full price: on the resulting power play, Aho converted Blake's elevated pass barely a minute later to make it 2-0, per NHL.com. The Kraken never got the momentum back.
A Finnish night all around
Finnish defenseman Juuso Valimaki made it 3-0 in the second after Logan Stankoven won the face-off that started the sequence, and Aho added his second in the third off a give-and-go with K'Andre Miller. Frederick Gaudreau's late goal off a loose puck spared Seattle the shutout. Brandon Bussi needed only 12 saves for the win; Philipp Grubauer stopped 26 at the other end.
"You knew it meant a lot to him," Carolina coach Rod Brind'Amour said of Aho's emotional week. Aho himself kept it simple: "Obviously it felt good."
What it means
Carolina, at 15-3-2 through 20 games, keeps looking like the team the rest of the Metropolitan will be chasing all season — and this performance, in the words of the Canes' own recap, came without needing anything spectacular. Seattle, now 9-7-1 and losers of three of its past four, left its coach searching for answers. "We had a plan coming in; I don't know that we stuck to it very well," Lane Lambert said. The Kraken's margin for error in a crowded Pacific is already thinner than their record suggests, and nights like this one are the kind that get a road trip — even a glamorous one — labeled a missed opportunity.