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MILAN — Jaroslav Halák was fighting back tears in the mixed zone, and just like it had been on the ice, it was a losing battle.
Slovakia — the proud hockey nation of Peter Šťastný, of Peter Bondra, of Pavol Demitra, of Marián Hossa, of Zdeno Chára, of Žigmund Pálffy — had just lost 3-1 to Slovenia in the group stage of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, its third game of the tournament and its third humbling defeat. And it wasn’t even as close as the score indicated.
Losing to the United States and Russia was one thing, but losing to Slovenia, a tiny nation with just one NHL player on the roster, was almost unfathomable.
And deep in his heart, Halák knew it was only going to get worse for his beloved homeland.
“Time is catching up with everybody,” he said. “You look at our roster four years ago (in Vancouver), and we had really good hockey players in their primes. It’s hard to replace them.”
Then, Halák paused. Exhaled sharply. Tried to compose himself before speaking a truth that shook him to his core.
“Nobody’s coming,” he said softly. “We have nobody young coming up.”
Slovakia finished ninth in the World Championship later that year. Ninth in 2015 and 2016, too. They were 14th in 2017. Then 11th in the 2018 Olympics. Ninth again at Worlds in 2018 and 2019, then eighth, then eighth, then ninth again.
The youth hockey scene was in shambles. There was infighting in the national hockey federation. The best young players were fleeing to Sweden and Finland, where ice and opportunity were plentiful. There weren’t enough rinks. There wasn’t enough money. There wasn’t enough talent.
There wasn’t enough hope.
“We didn’t produce a lot of players,” said Michal Handzuš, another member of that 2014 Olympic team. “We didn’t have a youth program like everyone has in this modern era of hockey. It felt that (dire) at the time.”
Then along came Juraj Slafkovský.
Slafkovský arrived on the hockey scene at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, when he scored seven goals in seven games to lead Slovakia to a shocking bronze medal, its first of any color since the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992. That performance rocketed the hulking winger up draft charts, and the 2022 draft proved to be a watershed moment for Slovak hockey — Slafkovský went No. 1 overall to the Montreal Canadiens, with countryman Šimon Nemec going second to the New Jersey Devils. Montreal took another Slovak, Filip Mešár, at No. 26. Adam Sýkora went 63rd overall to the New York Rangers. There had been just one Slovak player taken in 2021, and he went 128th. Two were taken in 2020. One in 2019.
A year after the Slafkovský draft, eight more Slovaks were drafted — one more than the rival Czech Republic had — including two more first-rounders, Dalibor Dvorský and Samuel Honzek, and three more second-rounders, Adam Gajan, Martin Štrbák and Martin Misiak.
A few years later, Slafkovský is the face of Slovak hockey and a star in the making. He had two goals and an assist in an opening upset of Finland on Wednesday. On Friday, Slafkovský followed that up with an assist in Slovakia’s 3-2 win over a surprisingly competitive Italian team.
The question is: Is Slovak hockey back? Or is this a fluke, a once-in-a-lifetime group of young stars?
The answer is, well, complicated.
Handzuš is the director of the youth program in his hometown of Banská. He was part of Craig Ramsay’s coaching staff that helped put Slovakia back on the hockey map, but resigned in protest when the federation continued to allow its players to play in the KHL after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
As a leader in the national federation, Handzuš helped usher in this exciting new generation of Slovak players. As a leader at the grassroots level, he’s learned firsthand just how difficult it will be to create another.
There are 400 players in the Banská program between the ages of 5 and 20. More want in. But there are only two ice sheets in town, and they’re already well past capacity.
“In Finland around 2010, they said, ‘We need to build more rinks and have more players,’” Handzuš said. “We don’t have that. We are a little bit poorer country than Finland, so it’s tough to build the ice rinks. And in this era where everything got really expensive, I don’t see us building more ice rinks. We need to work with what we have and be really efficient within the system.”
Handzuš uses the word “efficient” a lot. That’s the key, he says. There are other towns in Slovakia that don’t have enough kids to fill their ice sheets. You can’t force people to move to other towns, but you can do a better job of building up the programs in those areas so that what little ice the country does have isn’t wasted.
Miro Šatan, the former NHL star who has been the head of the Slovak Ice Hockey Federation since 2019, has his detractors. There are always rumblings of nepotism, of squandered resources and a failure to keep homegrown talent. But there has been progress, too. Slovak coaches have been dispatched to Finland to study how the similarly sized country (both have fewer than 6 million people) has continued to have two or three dozen players in the NHL every year, and has largely kept pace with mighty Sweden, Canada and the United States year after year. They’ve brought Finnish-style coaching methods and organizational structures back to Slovakia.
Slafkovský and Co. are, of course, a source of enormous pride in Slovakia. The dirty little secret, however, is that they’re not really a product of the Slovak system. When Slafkovský was 12 years old, a group of parents, including Slafkovský’s father, created their own team outside of the Slovak system that essentially barnstormed across North America. Of the 14 Slovaks drafted in 2022 and 2023, eight were on that team.
Slovakia pulled off an upset over Finland to open its Olympic tournament on Wednesday. (Andy Cheung / Getty Images)
They were the exception, not the rule. And sure enough, in 2024, just one Slovak — Miroslav Šatan Jr., in the seventh round — was drafted. This past year, just three were taken, the same number as Belarus.
“Slovakia as a whole has done a better job with young players, but it’s really been on the parents,” said Dvorský, who’s in his first season with the St. Louis Blues and is on the 2026 Olympic team in Milan. “It really is about the parents. They sacrifice a lot for us to be drafted high, so that helps. I don’t know if any one thing has changed back home. It’s getting better, for sure. But there’s still a lot of work to do.”
The bronze medal in Beijing, even without NHL players participating, was another seminal moment for Slovakia. Young players all know the legendary names that starred for Slovakia in the 1990s and 2000s, but Slafkovský and his cohort were small children when Demitra captained his country to a solid fifth-place finish in Turin, and when Chara captained them all the way to the bronze medal game, where they lost a heartbreaker to Finland.
Even the Sochi disaster is ancient history to these guys.
“I don’t really remember anything about it,” said Honzek, who has cracked the Calgary Flames roster this season. “But when I look at it now, it’s crazy.”
But when Slovakia gathered its top players over the summer ahead of the Olympics, it was those veterans from the Beijing team — not the Hall of Famers of years past — who left the youngsters in awe. After all, they were bronze medalists. At the Olympics.
“They were guys I never met, I just watched when we won the bronze in Beijing,” Honzek said. “It was a pretty cool experience to be in the same room as them and think, ‘In a couple months, I might be playing with them on the same team.’”
Honzek said that back in December, before the Slovak roster was even announced. But he said the rest of the hockey world was sure to underestimate them, and that, “We could be sneaky good.”
After the Finland win, they won’t be sneaking up on anyone. Slafkovský was dominant, goaltender Samuel Hlavaj, who plays for the AHL’s Iowa Wild, was brilliant. And the rest of the team played smart, savvy, opportunistic hockey — beating Finland at its own game. It was a raucous atmosphere to open the Olympics, as Slovak fans flocked to Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena in droves, chanting and waving flags and cheering themselves hoarse, even drowning out the Finnish fans.
Slafkovský soaked it all in.
“It’s wonderful,” he said. “I had no idea this many fans would come. I’m just happy that they all came. They were cheering, and it’s nice to hear some cheers in the Slovak language.”
The next time Slovakia gathers its best players, it’ll be Slafkovský and Dvorský and Honzek who leave the next generation slack-jawed and star-struck. The true hope of Slovak hockey isn’t Slafkovský, it’s what he can mean, what he can inspire. Because grassroots organizing and fundraising are critical to beefing up and improving the youth hockey programs in Slovakia.
But international success is rocket fuel.
“When your national team has some winning, then hockey gets popular and then more kids are going to play,” Handzuš said. “It’s huge.”
Dvorský was 8 years old when Halák and the Slovaks reached their nadir in Sochi. But unlike some of his contemporaries, he’s something of a Slovak hockey historian, poring through grainy YouTube videos of all those great names of years past. He knows how much they meant to past generations of Slovaks, and he can only imagine what it would be like to mean that much to future generations of Slovaks.
“It’s a dream, for sure, to get to that level where they were,” he said. “That’s what we’re working for.”
It won’t happen overnight. The changes that Handzuš is making at the youth level, the application of those lessons learned by coaches on those scouting trips in Finland, the slow grind of cleaning up the federation at the national level — these will take years, not one fortnight.
“You cannot do it in a year, or two, or even four,” Handzuš said. “Development — if you start making changes, it takes years. Because if you start developing and start changing the methodology of practices and you’re working with a 6-year-old, it’s 12 years before he’s 18. You can change a lot of stuff for the older ages, but you have to be patient. … It’s important for Slovakia hockey to see that we can do it, that we can have high draft picks. But now, even more important, is to be consistent and produce players like that consistently. It’s tougher for us, but we can do it.”
The Americans have a population of 330 million. When it comes to finding 20 elite players for the national team, the sheer mathematical advantage over tiny Slovakia is massive. One great youth team — forged and developed largely outside the Slovak system — can’t change a country’s fortunes on its own.
But it’s a start. Twelve years after hitting rock bottom in Sochi, Slovakia is on the rise.
Somebody was coming, after all. And on the world’s grandest sporting stage, they’ve finally arrived.