When you mention Sweden in North America, certain stereotypes come to mind: perhaps “Dancing Queen” jumps into your head or the dulcet tones of Swedish Chef. Maybe you picture a blue-eyed blonde or a pile of meatballs. Almost certainly you think of IKEA.
The truth is that many of those Swedish stereotypes just are not accurate. Abba certainly were popular in Sweden in their heyday, but there’s so much more to pop music in Sweden than just Abba and they’re also home to some of the best metal, punk, and rock bands out there. No one in Sweden sounds like Swedish Chef, not everyone in Sweden is blonde, and meatballs...well, they do love meatballs.
And IKEA is legitimately Swedish, as are most of the quirky names of its many flat-boxed products. IKEA began in Sweden in 1943 and there are currently 17 stores in its home country. Canada boasts just a dozen.
Ask someone from Vancouver about Sweden, and you might get a more specific answer than the above stereotypes: the Sedins. Daniel and Henrik Sedin are arguably the best players in franchise history and also undeniably Swedish. No one in BC falls into the trap of thinking all Swedes are blonde, that’s for sure.
The Sedin twins are also beloved in Sweden, winning Olympic gold in 2006 and leading Sweden to World Championship gold on home ice in 2013. Henrik and Daniel have each won the Viking Award as the best Swedish player in the NHL, joining Thomas Gradin and Markus Naslund as the only Canucks to win that particular prize.
So, when IKEA wanted to feature an easily-recognizable Swedish hockey player in their 2018 catalogue, who else would they turn to but one of the Sedins? Sure enough, Henrik Sedin gets a little cameo in their section on the BESTÅ storage system. See?
Okay, so maybe it’s not much of a cameo, but if you look at the TV where the not-Sedin-looking couple are playing not-Xbox, that is most definitely a video game version of Henrik taking a faceoff while wearing a slightly green-looking Canucks home jersey. You can even see a small gap between the first letter on the back of the jersey and the rest of his name, so you know it says, “H. SEDIN.”
This was spotted by a keen-eyed redditor and you have to think this was put in as an easter egg by a hockey-loving IKEA catalogue designer, hoping someone would spot it. Just one question remains: who is he facing off against?
15 players wore the number 42 last season. We can dismiss Drew Shore pretty quickly, because he wore 42 with the Canucks. Of the rest, 7 were centres. Only two of those wore a jersey featuring the colour red: John Quenneville of the New Jersey Devils and Joakim Nordstrom of the Carolina Hurricanes.
The jersey isn’t quite right for either of those teams, but it’s closest to the Hurricanes. They don’t have red numbers and it has the wrong stripes on the bottom, but it’s otherwise pretty close. Also, Nordstrom is Swedish and just won a gold medal with Sweden at the 2017 World Championships.
Another redditor suggested an alternate theory: Tyler Bozak, who wears 42 for the Leafs. The style matches the old Reebok Leafs jerseys in terms of the number of stripes on the sleeves and on the bottom, suggesting the jersey was just photoshopped red for the catalogue, perhaps to obfuscate the fact that they're using NHL players and jerseys. That would also explain the green-tinged Canucks jersey on Henrik.
The other alternative is that the player opposite Henrik isn’t supposed to represent a specific player at all and his number is 42 as a nod to Douglas Adams.
