Slafkovsky’s bid for better start begins with urgency at Canadiens training camp

BROSSARD, Que. — It was in the last minute of Martin St. Louis’ training camp-opening press conference that he felt compelled to mention that it’s not as if he tells the media anything he isn’t telling his players.

It was unintentionally funny because the comment came moments after he answered a question of ours with a lengthy sermon he had surely delivered to his players earlier on Wednesday.

St. Louis wasn’t trying to crack us up, but he did anyway, and we appreciate that almost as much as we do the candour with which he delivers his answers at every press conference.

The content of St. Louis’ sermon resonated, too. And though it applied to every player at Canadiens camp, we couldn’t help but think it applied most to one player in particular.

Because the message was about not just seizing the day but also the moment. In practical hockey terms, it was about making decisions in a practice or scrimmage like they were decisions you’d be making in Game 1 of the regular season or Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final. In laymen’s terms, it was about urgency, and it certainly dispelled any notion of the pre-season being meaningless.

“The shinny hockey is over, (the real hockey) has gotta start now,” St. Louis said. “The decision you make with the puck in the neutral zone, it’s gotta start now. How your alarm goes off from offence to defence, it’s gotta start now. The way we play in our d-zone, it’s gotta start now…”

For Slafkovsky, it started way later in each of his first three NHL seasons. 

That was understandable when he was the youngest player in the league, just months after he was picked first overall in the 2022 Draft. It could even be excused in his sophomore season, when he really struggled to take flight through the first half before soaring in the second.

But the Slovakian took the long road towards success once again last season and finished it off by saying if there was one thing he’d have changed, it would’ve been showing up ready to perform in October rather than in January.

If Slafkovsky took St. Louis’ message to heart, he knows now that even October is too late.

“It starts now. Yesterday,” St. Louis repeated on Friday, after the second day of on-ice sessions had been completed.

“It starts with the player,” he said. “You can’t hold everyone’s hand, and he’s not 18 years old anymore either. He’s older, he’s more mature, he has experience. How do you measure if someone’s hungry? I’m not talking about hungry for food, but hungry for success. For me, it’s urgency. You see if the person has urgency, if he’s ready for the day, ready for right now. It’s not, ‘Oh, tomorrow I’ll start,’ or ‘Oh, I’ll wait for exhibition games,’ or ‘Oh, I’ll wait for the start to the season.’ It’s right now.

“It’s so competitive that if you don’t have that mentality, you don’t up your percentage of going to get success. It starts with the individuals, but we’re talking to them about how we don’t just want to hope. When you just rely on hope, it’s like relying on excuses; it gets you nowhere. So, we have to have honesty. If we see that there’s another level, if it’s ‘Slaf, you have another level,’ (we’ll tell him) it’s ‘Let’s go, right now.’”

The hope is that St. Louis doesn’t have to tell Slafkovsky anything else.

The player possesses all-world talent but also enough experience to know he can’t access that talent as much as he wants or needs to without leaning on his other natural gifts. That means getting his six-foot-three, 225-pound body moving at full steam on the forecheck and using his physical edge to create space for himself and his linemates.

Had Slafkovsky led with that approach at the start of the last three seasons, we wouldn’t be talking about him being the player who most needs to heed St. Louis’ message about urgency.

The good thing is, Slafkovsky has heeded that message.

“Some things were missing in my game, but I think I figured out what I need to do,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t commit to doing all the things I needed to do the past two years, and I just started to do them halfway through the season.”

“Play hard, use my body, like I said a thousand times already,” Slafkovsky said. “Just win pucks, get to the net, be strong when I have the puck, make the right decisions on the ice, and score some goals.”

He can score more than just some after potting 20 two seasons ago and 18 more last season.

Slafkovsky is once again playing with the team’s most talented forwards in Nick Suzuki and Cole Caufield and, given that he’s played with them more than any other Canadiens forwards over the last three seasons, he should be prepared to succeed with them immediately.

It’s why when St. Louis was asked twice on Friday about his role in Slafkovsky’s start to the season, he put the onus on the player.

The coach certainly wasn’t joking around.