Atte Joki isn’t in North Texas with the Dallas Stars’ prospect group this week, and that’s by design. After a strong July Development Camp, the fifth-round pick from 2025 is already back in Finland, three games into his first Liiga season with HIFK and trying to help one of the league’s most storied clubs steady itself.
Dallas took Joki knowing this was never going to be a quick turn. He signed a two-year deal with HIFK through spring 2028, and the development path points toward staying put in Finland for now. With Kari Takko running European scouting for the Stars - the same eye that helped identify players like Esa Lindell, Miro Heiskanen and Roope Hintz - Dallas understood the timeline.
HIFK’s setup gives Joki something he can actually use. Olli Jokinen arrived as coach in November 2025 after guiding Timrå IK to a sixth-place finish in the SHL.
Jokinen played 1,231 NHL games as a center, and he also coached Aatu Räty at Jukurit before heading to Sweden. For a young center like Joki, that matters.
Jokinen knows what an NHL center has to become, and he’s already worked through a similar development track with another young Finn.
The roster around Joki is built for pressure. HIFK carries Liiga’s biggest player budget at four million euros and added Jake Leschyshyn, who has 77 NHL games and 337 AHL games, to strengthen the middle of the ice.
Joki doesn’t need to be the guy carrying the load. He can settle into a checking role and learn on a team that’s trying to avoid relegation, surrounded by veterans who’ve played at higher levels.
That environment looks messy early. HIFK opened with a win over HPK, then lost 5-1 to TPS, 3-1 to Jukurit and 3-2 to KalPa.
Jokinen told Finnish media there are “a lot of problems” with the playing style. In the expanded 17-team superkausi, with three relegation slots at the bottom, HIFK is already sitting near the wrong end of the table despite spending more than anyone else in the league.
For Joki, that’s part of the education. At 19, he’s learning how to function inside organizational dysfunction, and that’s a different kind of growth than simply piling up wins.
The usage tells a pretty clear story. In preseason, Jokinen gave him 16:12 a night, more than a minute on the power play and 13 faceoffs per game.
That was middle-six treatment. Once the games counted, the leash tightened to 11:14 per game and six faceoffs.
Still, the underlying numbers are encouraging. His puck battle win rate has jumped from 46% at Lukko last season to 64% through three HIFK games. It’s a tiny sample, but it fits what the eye says about his game: he’s hard to move and he’s winning more of the dirty work.
The passing has ticked up too. Joki has gone from 82% to 88% pass accuracy, and his puck losses have dropped from 3.2 per game to 2.7.
His Corsi for is 58% and his Fenwick for is 61%, both well ahead of his Lukko marks of 45% and 48%. That means HIFK is getting more of the shot share when he’s on the ice, even while the team around him is struggling.
He’s also put five shots on goal in three games, and they’ve come from the slot, which says he’s finding the right ice.
The biggest issue remains the faceoff circle. Joki is at 32% through three games, down from 41% at Lukko, which was already a weak point. Against pro competition and with new linemates, that part of the game hasn’t carried over yet.
Joki’s skating still sets the tone for everything else. I ranked him fourth at Dallas’s development camp this summer and called him the quiet winner of the week. I’ve tracked him for more than a year, and the baseline has always been the same: explosive skating from his junior days, real separation in short bursts, and first-step acceleration that stands up well even against older players.
The challenge is what happens after that first push. His muscle tone stays high through the full stride, the recovery gets heavy, and that affects both his sustained speed and his puck skill at pace.
Dallas skating coaches worked directly with him at development camp, and at 19 he’s still growing into a 6-foot-2, 201-pound frame. The physical side already looks pro-ready, and the early HIFK puck-battle results back that up.
The best glimpse of his offensive ceiling came in July against Canada at the U20 level. Playing center on Finland’s fourth line, Joki scored on a catch-and-release wrister after a cross-slot rush pass, and the release beat the goalie before he could get set.
That’s a different kind of goal than the net-front rebounds that defined his draft year, and it hints that the hands are catching up to the body. In that same game, he forced a Canadian turnover with pressure that directly led to a goal, then got himself ejected for cross-checking a retriever into the end boards.
That was Joki in a nutshell.
What to watch next is simple: does HIFK trust him on the penalty kill the way Lukko did last season? He had regular shorthanded shifts there, and that’s where a player with his size, compete level and defensive instincts can win a coach’s trust.
If that role follows him to HIFK, the path toward an NHL bottom six gets shorter. If it doesn’t, the faceoff and decision-making gaps become harder to ignore than the early puck-battle gains suggest.
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