Martin Pospisil’s advice for Sam Honzek ahead of his NHL debut is pretty simple.
“You have to play with kind of a F-you mindset,” Pospisil explained. “It’s always a 50-50 battle and either they’re going to win the battle or you’re going to win it.”
It’s simple advice that Honzek will surely keep in mind as he skates in his first NHL game on Wednesday night when the Calgary Flames take on the Canucks in Vancouver.
Their off-season training partnership helped Honzek elevate his game and go from a guy who some people were writing off last year to a player who is skating next to Nazem Kadri and Andrei Kuzmenko this week.
And Pospisil, after all, was in a similar position only a year ago. Few people had him on their radar to play big minutes for the Flames last fall, but a strong training camp earned him an early-season call-up and he never looked back, establishing himself as an everyday NHLer.
After spending parts of four seasons in the AHL, Pospisil made himself invaluable to the Flames by scoring eight goals and adding 16 assists in 63 games, finishing with the third-best plus-minus on the roster at plus-14 and playing with an ‘F-you mindset’ that saw him lead the team in penalty minutes, with 109, and hits, with 238.
“Last year, (Honzek) didn’t have a great camp and people were kind of writing him off, and Marty had a couple years like that,” said Flames head coach Ryan Huska. “There were some injury problems along the way but he stuck with it and he did the same thing last year that Honzy did this year. There’s probably a little messaging going on that ‘Hey, it can happen, you can do this.’
“Even though he’s a young guy, I think he does some quiet things around our room that show a little bit of leadership starting to creep out.”
Honzek has been the biggest story of training camp at the Saddledome this year. Pospisil being shifted from the wing to centre to play alongside Jonathan Huberdeau and Anthony Mantha is one of the most intriguing lineup moves the Flames have made heading into the 2024-25 regular season, too.
And while they’re not identical players, there are still lessons that the 19-year-old Honzek can learn from the only slightly-older 24-year-old Pospisil.
And working together back home in Slovakia this summer was mutually beneficial, too.
“The first couple weeks I was pushing him, but the last couple weeks he was pushing me,” Pospisil explained. “He’s a really strong kid but he’s still so young so he can still improve. The skating and the skills he has, I think that’s what our team needs on the ice, so I’m super proud of him and he just has to enjoy it and play like he did during the pre-season.”
All eyes will be on Honzek on Wednesday as he tries to carry the momentum he built in training camp into the higher intensity environment of the regular season. That will be an adjustment.
And Pospisil is trying to adjust his game, too, and trying to find how he can be as effective at centre as he was on the wing last year.
A nagging injury limited his availability during camp, so the Flames haven’t seen as much of him in between Huberdeau and Mantha as they would have liked, but Ryan Huska talked about how his speed and tenacity fighting for the puck — the ‘f-you mentality’ he was referring to — can open up space for Huberdeau and hopefully unlocking his playmaking abilities.
It’s a challenge, to be sure, but one that Pospisil seems to be full-heartedly embracing.
“I want to earn the trust from the coaches, now as a centre, and the trust is not easy to earn,” Pospisil said. “I’ll try to work as hard as I can in practice or in games to earn the trust and then just play the game. Even if I’m centre, I don’t want to change the style I’m playing.
“I want to win the battles and be first guy on the forecheck and the first guy on the backcheck. I know it’s not going to be easy, but I like to pick the hard job.”
Do the hard job. Play with a F-you mindset. Hopefully, stick around in the NHL.