Peters: Juraj Slafkovsky’s Draft stock rising after Olympic MVP performance
Finland may be the Olympic gold medalists, but the 2022 Winter Olympics will likely be best remembered as the coming out party for a 17-year-old Slovakian who etched his name in the Olympic record books, skated off with tournament MVP honors and help his country to their first Olympic hockey medal.
His name is Juraj Slafkovsky and hockey fans won’t soon forget it after he led all players with seven points, all goals, in the Beijing Olympics.
A lot more about him stood out besides the gaudy goal total and the cage IIHF rules required him to wear since he’s not yet 18. The 6-foot-4 forward, who will turn 18 next month, worked his way from the fourth line to the first line and will go down as an Olympic hero in a country that had not yet experienced such success on the biggest stage in international sport.
As one of two NHL Draft-eligible players competing for Slovakia, it wasn’t clear just how much of an impact he would have. Slafkovsky has played for both the Slovakia U20 and senior national teams before, at the 2021 IIHF Men’s World Championship and during Olympic qualifying over the summer.
In 16 prior games in IIHF competition, including the last two World Juniors – the latter of which was cancelled after two games – Slafkovsky had one point, an assist in Olympic qualifying.
Then he arrived at the Olympics, which admittedly is probably a step below even the senior World Championship in terms of quality of competition without NHL players, and exploded for seven goals. He even scored in the games the rest of his more experienced Slovakia teammates struggled to find the net.
Because of that offensive outburst, the excitement surrounding Slafkovsky has reached a fever pitch. He’s always been considered one of the top eligible players for this year’s draft, but now we’re all left wondering if he is high enough on the rankings.
In my mid-season draft rankings, I had Slafkovsky ranked 10th and felt his season to date had been trending in the wrong direction. He’s absolutely ripped apart events in his own age group like the Hlinka-Gretzky Cup where he had nine points and he’s been flat out dominant for the U20 team of Finnish pro club TPS.
However, when he’s gotten into pro games with TPS, he hasn’t played like a top player and his production reflects that. For instance, the top U18 player in Liiga so far this season is Joakim Kemell, who has 18 points in 25 games. Slafkovsky has four points in 21 contests.
The Olympic performance is obviously going to change the public perspective of Slafkovsky, but evaluators are still going to look at the entire body of work. That’s not to say there won’t be movement after the Olympics. You have to take all new information on any top prospect, contextualize it and include it in the overall evaluation.
To me, the goals were impressive, but Slafkovsky did a lot more than score. Most impressively, he earned the coaching staff’s trust and a larger role over the course of the tournament.
Starting on the fourth line, Slafkovsky played 12:57 in the first game. He scored twice in that contest against Finland in the preliminary round. He was still under 14 minutes in the next two games but scored a goal in each of them while combining for eight shots on goal in those contests against Sweden and Latvia. He saw more shifts in the elimination game against Germany and by the quarterfinal against the U.S., he was finally on Slovakia’s top line and playing like the guy that his team absolutely needed to have the puck.
So let’s take a deeper look at Slafkovsky’s performance and see what we can glean from it:
Slafkovsky was a driver for Slovakia’s offensive success
Beyond scoring 36% of the goals his team scored in the Olympics, Slafkovsky did a lot of things well for his team that led to their success in the tournament.
According to tracked events on InStat, a video scouting service, Slafkovsky had 38 shot attempts. Another thing that I thought really stood out was how often he was looked to as the player with the puck entering the zone. He was credited with 32 total entries, 23 of which were direct carry-ins by Slafkovsky and four more were via pass. InStat also tracked Slafkovsky has having an 89% success rate on 95 total passes during the tournament.
Slafkovsky’s ability to generate offense off entries and bringing pucks through the neutral zone was almost as impressive as his finishing capability. If there’s one nitpick, I’d like to see him direct more pucks to the middle quicker as a lot of entries ended with shots from the perimeter – sometimes on goal, sometimes not. He’s so big that even against pros, he’s difficult to contain. He doesn’t have blazing speed, but he skates really well and if he can drive the net a little more effectively, he’s going to have an awfully long career.
Additionally, according to InStat’s tracked data, Slovakia controlled the shot attempts at an astonishing rate of 67 percent with Slafkovsky on the ice. He also was credited with 19 individual scoring chances and Slovakia outscored opponents 8-3 with Slafkovsky on the ice.
Assessing Slafkovsky’s NHL-caliber attributes
If you watched any of Slafkovsky’s highlights from the Olympics, you’re probably already well aware of his shot. He has an NHL-level release and can get the puck off his stick in a hurry. He has a very good sense of how to get shots off under pressure and takes what is given to him when he has more time.
Some of his goals were a bit of right-place, right-time, where there was a fortunate bounce here or there. More often, however, he was getting himself to the right place at the right time with good anticipation skills and reading plays at an advanced level. That was something I had not seen enough of in Finland. Against U20 and U18 opponents he has the puck all the time practically. This tournament showed he can make an impact away from the puck, too, and make himself dangerous.
His hands looked really good in this tournament, too. He made a lot of creative plays and there were several one-on-one plays where he was able to escape the defender and make a positive play. There were also a few instances where he showed an ability to change gears while skating to open up some space for himself. That was something that really impressed me.
Lastly, the size is a factor. When you see a 6-foot-4 forward that can move like Slafkovsky does and has those hands, you start looking a lot closer at the ceiling and how far he can take his game. You also look at the hockey sense very closely because sometimes bigger players can hide those deficiencies by overpowering the opposition. I don’t think that was what he did against men. He can’t overpower them yet. He had to outthink them and anticipate to make himself dangerous. In this tournament in particular, he did that very successfully.
What needs work
As big as Slafkovsky is, I want to see more power from him. He can dominate the younger players and lower the shoulder, but if he wants to do that at the NHL level, he needs to continue to get stronger. He lost quite a few puck battles in this tournament and was sometimes a little too easy to knock off balance.
He’s not physically mature enough at this point to consistently outmuscle and outbattle adults, but most 17-year-olds aren’t. Strength is something I don’t worry too much about because he’s so young, still developing and he’s got the frame to support a lot more muscle. Physical maturity only comes with time and work. As long as he’s willing to put that work in, he’s going to be a force.
I think his skating is very good for a big guy, but a stronger lower body will create more burst and explosiveness. I certainly would not call his skating a deficiency by any means. I just think he’s got another gear in there somewhere that I think will come with strength, and perhaps a little bit better balance.
I do still have some concerns about his vision and some of his puck decisions. He has the hand skills to be a quality passer, but I don’t think his distribution ability is as advanced as his shooting ability. There’s nothing wrong with being a finisher, but I do want to see a little bit more of a refined decision-making process when he has the puck on his stick. Sometimes it was just a little behind the play and those passes were a little late or he had the puck taken off of him. That’s another thing I could see coming with a little more time and experience.
What about Slafkovsky’s draft stock?
I think this Olympic showing is going to absolutely have a positive impact on the way Slafkovsky is viewed overall. He doesn’t have a ton of room to move up because he’s already a consensus top-10 pick. But I do think we all are going to have to watch a lot more closely the rest of the season as he heads back to Finland.
What we don’t know yet is how much of a confidence booster this event is going to be for the 17-year-old. Perhaps TPS gives him a little more run up in the lineup now, too, as he was averaging 13:07 per game this season. He can really supercharge his draft stock if he gets back with his pro team and can perform at a similar level as he did for Slovakia.
On top of that, you should probably pencil him in on Slovakia’s World Championship team for another key viewing before the draft. You’d have to imagine the Olympic performance puts him on a path to starting that tournament way up the lineup, too. So there’s still a lot of season left.
On my board, the top two guys are pretty sizably ahead of the field as far as I’m concerned. Logan Cooley and Shane Wright have special capabilities that separate them. The race for No. 3 is wide open, however. While I’m not ready to hand that spot to Slafkovsky, he is absolutely under consideration with the clump of players that includes Ivan Miroshnichenko, Matthew Savoie, Joakim Kemell, Danila Yurov, David Jiricek, Simon Nemec and Frank Nazar. I think that particular group of players is very tight, at least on my personal board and make for an interesting lottery section of the draft.
There’s a lot of season left and ultimately we’ll have to decide how much we want to weigh the Olympics against the rest of his draft dossier, but Slafkovsky made a statement in Beijing and put the hockey world on high alert.