Aho Scores Twice in Helsinki as Hurricanes Beat Kraken 4-1

The NHL brought its best team to Finland, and Finland's best Hurricane stole the show. Sebastian Aho scored twice in his home country on Thursday as the first-place Carolina Hurricanes beat the Seattle Kraken 4-1 at Veikkaus Arena in Helsinki, opening the NHL Global Series in Finland.

Aho's line tells the night plainly: two goals in 17:53 of ice time, a plus-one rating, and the kind of performance the league scripts these trips hoping for and rarely gets this cleanly. The Hurricanes' leading scorer didn't just appear in Helsinki. He owned it.

Carolina arrived as the league's standard. The Hurricanes had won six of their last seven games before the trip and share the league lead, and their system — relentless pressure, waves of forechecking, no rest shifts — travels because it was never built on home ice in the first place. Seattle goaltender Philipp Grubauer made 26 saves and still spent the night under siege.

Aho wasn't the only Finn in red. Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Juuso Valimaki share his passport on Carolina's roster, and the Global Series games — Thursday through Saturday in Helsinki — are built for exactly this: NHL stars playing league games where they grew up dreaming about them.

The week also carried a milestone. Taylor Hall's 1,000th NHL game was celebrated by the Hurricanes at the Global Series, a career honor handed out in an arena on the other side of the Atlantic from where most of those thousand games were played.

Carolina also carried a title into the building: the Hurricanes are the defending Stanley Cup champions, and Aho — who won the Cup with them in 2026 and owns three All-Star selections — is the Finn at the center of the whole operation. A homecoming game for a champion, in front of a home crowd, with two goals: the Global Series is a marketing exercise on the calendar and a genuine sporting occasion when a night like Thursday happens.

Aho wears an alternate captain's letter for Carolina, and Thursday showed why the role fits. He played 17:53, scored in the flow of the Hurricanes' pressure game rather than on a showcase shift, and finished plus-one on a night when the whole building understood exactly who the evening belonged to. The teams complete the Helsinki set on Saturday before both fly back across the Atlantic and resume the season — Seattle looking for a split, Carolina looking for a sweep of its Finnish showcase.

The teams play again in Helsinki before heading home, and Seattle gets its immediate rematch. But the opener belonged to the homecoming. The NHL sells these series as a bridge between its league and its European roots. On Thursday, Aho was the bridge — two goals, in Finland, with the league's best team rolling behind him.