SAD NEWS : Canadiens super star Juraj Slafkovský confirm dead at 20 from a fatal car accident 😢😭

Juraj Slafkovský is both proof of what the Canadiens saw in him and a lesson for us all

BROSSARD, Que. — Juraj Slafkovský had just turned 17 a couple months earlier when he first suited up for the Slovak men’s national team at the 2021 IIHF World Championships. It was practically unheard of to have a player this young on this stage.

But for Slafkovský, it was a learning experience he is benefiting from now. His first practice with the team, he said he could barely make a pass, he was so nervous. And who wouldn’t be? But as time passed, he grew more comfortable and eventually, despite being the youngest player on the team, he adapted and began playing his game.

He played six games for Slovakia and didn’t register a point, but the fact he was there at all at that age was an accomplishment unto itself.

A year later, Slafkovský went to the Olympics, began the tournament near the bottom of the lineup and ended it at the top, scored seven goals in seven games and led Slovakia to a bronze medal. That was the first time, he says now, that he felt the pressure of expectations, because it was an entire country’s expectations being heaped on him heading into the 2022 world championships.

“Probably when we were at the Olympics and I actually did something and then we went to the world championships and everyone was saying, can he do it again? Can he produce and help Slovakia do it again?” Slafkovský said after Montreal Canadiens practice Wednesday. “It was great at such a young age I could be under pressure and play with men and know how it is when someone is actually expecting something from you. You can’t just go out there and have fun anymore. Yeah, it helped me a lot.”

That same learning curve is what we are seeing with Slafkovský now. Last season, playing in the NHL at 18, the fact he was even in Montreal at that age was also an accomplishment unto itself. But a year later, Slafkovský is not simply going out there and having fun anymore.

A big part of why the Canadiens took Slafkovský No. 1 in 2022 was his history of handling pressure and how well-suited it would be to this market. He is proving they were right to prioritize this with him because a normal 19-year-old might have been crushed by some of the things that were being written about him in early November, including by me, and if you read the comments on that story after the Canadiens played in Arizona, you will get a good sense of the narrative surrounding Slafkovský at that time.

How did he get from there to here? A lot of hard work, but also a lot of mental preparation.

It is not at all the same thing, but Kaiden Guhle’s past experience gives him some unique perspective into what Slafkovský has gone through thus far in his short NHL career. Guhle was the No. 1 pick in the WHL draft by the Prince Albert Raiders in 2017, and while the external pressure a top pick feels in junior pales in comparison to what Slafkovský faced in Montreal, internally, at a younger age, that pressure can feel very similar.

“Obviously it’s a different scale, but at the same time I see similarities in what we went through,” Guhle said. “My first year in the Dub wasn’t easy at all. I had to go through a lot of different challenges. Production-wise, for me it wasn’t really there. For him last year, it wasn’t really there for what he wanted. Just trying to stay out of the media and seeing what people were saying, which can take a toll on a young guy, and he’s never really been through something like that before. It’s totally different. Off the ice he just stays out of that stuff, doesn’t look into that stuff anymore. On the ice, you can just tell he’s so much more confident and has so much more swagger, which is fun to see.

“I’m happy for him, because being a first overall pick in this type of market can be tough sometimes. There were definitely a couple of rough days for him last year, I’m happy for him that he’s coming out on top of it.”

Juraj Slafkovský celebrates a goal with teammate Kaiden Guhle.
Guhle and Slafkovský have become friends off the ice. When most of the team was out of town over Christmas, Guhle stayed in Montreal with his girlfriend, and they had Slafkovský over to spend Christmas with them. The two have clearly talked, and Guhle had an insider’s view of what Slafkovský went through last season — the criticism of the Canadiens picking him at No. 1 that he was very aware of, the desire to prove those people wrong.

“I think you have to build a couple of callouses around you, toughen you up a little bit,” Guhle said. “He went through the same thing at times in his career before he got here. I think it’s good for anybody to go through adversity and go through tough times, that’s when you really get challenged, your character and your work ethic and when things aren’t going your way, how you get yourself out of it.

“That’s what he did.”

Someone else who has always had to prove people wrong is Cole Caufield. It has fueled him throughout his career, to prove to people he could succeed at his size, and that chip on his shoulder has made him into the player he is today.

“It just reminds you that you always need to keep working, you can never be satisfied with where you’re at,” Caufield said. “I’ve always thought there’s always somebody better than you and there’s always somebody coming for your spot. I think Slaf’s in that situation right now where he just wants to prove to people that he deserved to be in that spot. He’s proving it to us every day. Being around the environment that he’s in, he’s got all the resources that you could want to get better around here.

“But he’s also pushing everybody else around him, and I think that’s his best attribute right now.”

As badly as it was going for Slafkovský in November, that was never going to define him as a player, because he was never going to allow it. But it takes some mental wherewithal to push through that and come out the other side the way he has.

And it should perhaps serve as a lesson to all of us in terms of how we talk about and evaluate these players so early in their careers.

As well as things are going for Slafkovský right now, there’s no reason to jump completely in the opposite direction, to start comparing him to Mikko Rantanen or projecting him to become a 100-point player. If his struggles in November were never going to define him as a player, his success now probably shouldn’t either. He’s still 19 for another six weeks.

But more important than the points is the fact Slafkovský has shown a commitment and an openness and the intelligence to improve, to absorb all the information he’s been given the last year and a half and start applying that to his game so effectively.

There is value to NHL equivalency models and looking at history to try and predict the future, but at the end of the day, these players are human beings with brains and emotions and personalities and abilities to respond to pressure, to criticism, to everything unique to them.

There’s nothing wrong with getting excited about what Slafkovský is doing now, but the sample size remains just as small as it was when he struggled in October and November.

That said, his current stretch of success is further proof that young players entering the NHL need time. Quinton Byfield is showing that in Los Angeles right now, as is Marco Rossi in Minnesota, or even Kirby Dach and Alex Newhook in Montreal. Making the NHL is hard, but it is especially hard for a teenager, and it is even harder for a teenager coming from Europe. Slafkovský is still one of only nine players from the 2022 draft to play more than five NHL games at this point.

The way people are talking about Slafkovský now makes it funny to think back to something he said on the night he was drafted less than two years ago.

“Hockey is their passion, as well as mine,” Slafkovský said of Canadiens fans that night at the Bell Centre. “Maybe some of them didn’t like me, but I will do everything to play good for this team, and so that actually they will like me one day.”

A few weeks from now, the Canadiens will probably bring David Reinbacher over from Switzerland to make his North American professional debut, most likely in Laval. When The Athletic spoke to him last month in Kloten, Reinbacher expressed a need for him to prove himself to the fans who didn’t agree with the Canadiens picking him at No. 5 in the 2023 draft, just as Slafkovský did after he was drafted. Reinbacher felt the full support of the organization, but from the fans, he wasn’t sure.

“He got drafted and there were some people that weren’t happy and there was a lot of stuff in the media that was going on,” Guhle said of Reinbacher’s time in training camp last fall. “He’s a pretty quiet, shy guy, and he just came in and was still just happy to be here. A lot of people would have probably been rubbed the wrong way by that and wouldn’t have really wanted to be here, but he wanted to be here, wanted to get better and he was asking questions and you could see that. It showed what type of person he was.

“I got to know him a little bit over the time he was here for camp, and he’s a really down-to-earth kid, loves hockey. It was pretty impressive actually to see how he handled that when a lot of people would have not handled it that way.”

It is possible Reinbacher will not work out for the Canadiens. It is still possible even Slafkovský won’t work out for the Canadiens, as difficult as that is to imagine right at this moment.

But that’s kind of the point.

When it comes to young, promising players full of potential like this, right at this moment is irrelevant. It is the potential, the finished product that matters most, and perhaps it would be important to keep that in mind.