When the Montreal Canadiens announced the selection of Juraj Slafkovsky first-overall at the Bell Centre, the reaction was mixed to say the least. Every fan of the team wanted them to make the right pick, but it was a crop of players without a Crosby, McDavid, or MacKinnon at the top to make that decision clear. The team knew that going into the draft, and as Kent Hughes put it, they wanted to do their homework and select the player they felt would be the best by their mid-twenties, not necessarily the best player at that moment in time.
After a lackluster rookie season finding his footing in the NHL, Slafkovsky’s sophomore season is going a long way to proving the Habs right.
We’ve heard it all when it comes to Slafkovsky over the last year and change. “It’s Doug Wickenheiser all over again.” “Oh boy, he’s in Patrik Stefan territory.” “Nail Yakupov, anyone?” Of those three to which Slafkovsky has been ostensibly held in comparison at times by those eager to write him off, only one ever had a single season where they scored as many points as he has this year, and arguably none had to face the instant scrutiny that he did. He’s been able to tune out all of the noise, focusing solely on improving his game, and the sheer degree to which he’s improved is impressive.
Tuesday night’s hat trick all but crushed the Philadelphia Flyers’ playoff hopes, and improved Slafkovsky’s season to 48 total points with four games left to play. Given his recent level of play, he stands an excellent chance of reaching the 50-point and 20-goal plateaus for the first time. If you had believed all of the denigration being thrown his way online last year, these plateaus would have seemed like things he would never reach at all, let alone in his second season in the league.
But he is teaching a virtue this season, one which many hockey fans simply do not have – patience when it comes to non-generational draft picks. If there isn’t a Crosby-type player available when you’re up first-overall, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of getting a player who will enter the league and immediately give you point-per-game production. They may never provide such production, but if the organization remains patient – which Montreal has in their case – they can help the player become the best possible version of themselves.
Slafkovsky is still one of the youngest players in the league this season, even with another draft class having a few players enter the league as teenagers. The rampant desire among fans and pundits to write him off felt contrived, as if they simply couldn’t accept the notion that a player drafted first-overall may need time to acclimate. In Slafkovsky’s case, he showed some flashes of ability in a shortened rookie season, and has improved exponentially over the course of his sophomore run. Evidently, all of the things that people were clowning him for were growing pains, and he looks like a different player now that he’s had the time to acclimate.
If the Habs listened to all of the noise last year, or early this season, they’d have sent him down to Laval, or perhaps tried to loan him to a club in Europe. We can’t say with certainty that either of those routes would have been bad for him, but we definitely wouldn’t have gotten the chance to see him prove what he’s proven this season – that he belongs in the NHL.
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