Late last season he put some heat on Auston Matthews to be the top player selected in the NHL draft.

At one point he even suggested, with a bit of a wink, perhaps, that he should be the No. 1 pick.

But while Patrik Laine might have grabbed a few more spring headlines and offered up a few more juicy quotes, when it comes to the NHL debuts of the top two picks in the fall, he'll have to take a back seat.

The day after Matthews popped eyeballs around the hockey world with his four-goal display for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Laine took to the ice for the Winnipeg Jets, Thursday, and, well, he played a regular shift.

Yeah, that was about it – until he showed off his famous wrist shot to score a power play goal with 6:33 left to give the Jets some late life, then helped set up the game-tying goal by Mathieu Perreault with 1:29 to go, allowing the Jets to pull out a 5-4 win in overtime.

After waiting through four pre-season games and more than two periods Thursday to see a glimpse of Laine's ability, Jets fans got a gush of it in the end, and went bonkers.

“It's amazing to score the goal in front of the home crowd — it's unbelievable,” Laine said. “I've never been part of anything like that.”

It had been an underwhelming training camp for the Finn.

Going back to the World Cup, the man billed as having the shot of Alex Ovechkin, a man who seemed to score at will in leading Finland to World Junior gold and his pro team to the Finnish league title had gone seven games without registering so much as a point, never mind a goal.

“He hasn't really showed it, yet,” Mathieu Perreault, his centre, said going into Thursday's game. “In the pre-season games he was pretty quiet... he's got the skills. He needs a bit more on the work side of the game, the grinding part of the game.

“I had to learn that, too. He's going to have to learn quick.”

Is two-and-a-half periods quick enough?

“Once you saw him pop that one in, he took off,” Jets captain Blake Wheeler said. “He was a force out there.”

Regardless what Laine had done in his debut, he's going to be big news in this town for years to come.

He might be even bigger news back home in Finland.

The newspaper Iltalehti paid to have reporter Pekka Jalonen spend two weeks here chronicling the 18-year-old's entrance into the NHL.

Two other Finnish reporters, one based in Toronto, the other in Vancouver, are also here filing reports about No. 29 back to his homeland.

“A lot of people think he's going to be the next Teemu Selanne,” Jalonen said.

There is no higher standing in Finland than Selanne.

“Even the people who don't like or follow ice hockey – he's like a rock star,” Jalonen said. “They want to know everything about him. The most popular person in Finland. There's never going to be anybody like Teemu in Finland. Everybody loves him.”

It's already begun for Laine, did before he even played his first game.

The media scrums here, one in Finnish, one in English, are just the latest demands on his time, demands Selanne wouldn't have had at 18. He didn't come to the Jets until he was 22.

Jalonen was here to cover that, too.

“Somebody wants to write a book about him already,” Jalonen said of Laine. “Women's magazines, they want to do interviews at his home. His Finnish agent had to say no.”

The serendipity of Laine being drafted by the same team as Selanne has been well documented.

So have some of his brasher statements, considered by some to be cocky.

“It's not typical for Finnish people,” Jalonen said. “Usually Finnish people are, 'I'm not sure I can make it.' But he's different. In a good way. It doesn't bother anybody. He has a lot of self-confidence.”

The most hyped prospect in Jets history, Laine watched most of Matthews' debut with the Leafs, and while he downplays the notion of any personal rivalry with his draft mate, the comparison will always be there.

“He can score 20 goals in a game – I don't care,” Laine said. “I'm just going to help my team.”

He's off to a good start, after all.