MONTREAL – The pressure of being a first-overall pick for the Canadiens will tower over anyone the same way... well, the same way Juraj Slafkovsky towers over most anyone.
The 6-foot-3, 220-pound forward puts that pressure on himself as much as – if not more than – anyone else, especially after his rookie NHL season was cut short due to injury. And while no one said playing in the NHL would be easy – certainly not for a teenager – Slafkovsky surely would’ve preferred that his goal-scoring drought to end his rookie season wouldn’t carry over into his sophomore campaign.
“I think the most pressure on Slaf is the pressure that he puts on himself. You sometimes could see that early in the season with his body language and things like that,” described assistant coach Trevor Letowski, a veteran of 616 NHL games. “We just try to put him in situations where he can succeed.”
But Slafkovsky’s coaches weren’t just looking at numbers on the scoresheet to measure his success. In fact, they were quite pleased with the progress he was showing earlier in 2023-24, even if it didn’t reflect in his scoring numbers.
“I find there have been a lot of games this year where Slaf played extraordinary but he didn’t produce,” recalled head coach Martin St-Louis in February. “When I would see that, his actions on the ice, I would say to myself: it won’t be long before a game like that would be a game of 2-3 points for him.”
We’d tell the bench boss to buy some more lottery tickets – Tuesday night’s hat trick performance is case in point – but it’s clear the coaching staff saw things in Slafkovsky’s game – and in his preparation – that showed he was ready for an expanded role.