Imagine being Martin and Monika Honzek during Saturday’s pre-game introductions at the Saddledome.
With music thumping, a smoke-machine pumping and 19,000-and-some light-up bracelets flashing in unison, they watched their 19-year-old son Sam step onto the ice, the rookie left-winger raising his stick to acknowledge an adoring crowd. As his name was announced, the C of Red roared.
Honzek’s proud parents must have been pinching themselves. They had arrived the previous day from Trencin, Slovakia, where Martin works as a police officer and Monika as a hairdresser and where both had been awake at 4 a.m. to watch his NHL debut earlier this week in Vancouver.
“They’re living my dream, too, when they come to visit,” Sam beamed after Saturday’s morning skate. “They’re really pumped. My dad, since he got in the car at the airport, he was taking pictures all over the city of everything possible. Typical dad. He’s excited. I think it’s going to be a good first NHL game for my mom and for my dad to watch and witness. It’s gonna be good. My second game in the NHL and the home-opener for Flames, so it’s going to be unreal for them.”
Martin, Monika and the rest of Saturday’s boisterous crowd were witnessing a relatively rare feat.
Sam Honzek is still two months shy of his 20th birthday. Going back the past 25 years, he is just the sixth teenager to earn a spot in the Flames’ lineup for their first home game of a new campaign. He joins Rico Fata (1999), Oleg Saprykin (1999), Sean Monahan (2013), Sam Bennett (2015) and Matthew Tkachuk (2016) in an exclusive club.
Honzek is an unlikely addition to that list, at least based on what people were saying about him as recently as mid-September. As he arrived in Calgary for training camp, he could have been a candidate for his own ‘Mean Tweets’ segment, with some fans wondering way too soon if this power-forward-in-progress would turn out to be a first-round bust. Yeah … at 19.
That worry was based on an underwhelming stat-line in his injury-plagued final junior campaign with the WHL’s Vancouver Giants. It’s a narrative the higher-ups at the Saddledome were certainly aware of. Head coach Ryan Huska even referenced it during the exhibition slate, saying: “I know after last year everyone was talking about, ‘Oh, jeez, where is this Honzek guy? Is he going to be a player?’ Well, he is a player.”
“I’m happy because he went through so much last year and he came in and he proved it to a lot of people, to people who were saying, ‘Well, maybe he’s not as good as they think,’ ” said Flames general manager Craig Conroy, who announced Honzek’s name at No. 16 overall in the 2023 NHL Draft. “I’m thinking, ‘You haven’t even seen him yet!’ I think it’s a good reminder for hockey fans, in general — give young guys time. Not everybody is Connor McDavid or Sidney Crosby. It takes time for young players, and we have to be patient.”
The Flames were willing to be much more patient with Honzek.
It just so happens that he accelerated the timeline with a superb pre-season showing, including a team-high seven points in tuneup action.
“I checked in with him in the summer and I remember him saying, ‘Marty, I’m going to make that team,’ ” said Flames development coach Martin Gelinas. “Sitting on the other side, I’m thinking, ‘Jeez, that’s a tough task.’ You don’t want to say to him, ‘This is going to be really hard.’ But to his credit, he applied himself, he was driven, he worked at it, he was grinding all summer and he came back and his fitness tests were some of the best.”
Ah yes, the annual fitness-testing rigmarole provided an early hint that Honzek was ready to make a major statement.
Of the 64 dudes who reported for camp in Calgary, he had the best result on the Wingate Test, a bike sprint that lasts for 10 seconds, although your ‘score’ is based on peak power over a six-second span. According to Flames director of sport performance Rick Davis, it’s a measure of “acceleration capabilities or horsepower.” He referred to Honzek’s output as “elite.”
“I’m proud of him because if you want to have success in this game, you have to be able and willing to grind off-ice. You have to be willing to spend the time and to do more than everybody else in the gym,” said Gelinas, an expert on this topic since his own commitment to his conditioning helped him to stick around for 1,273 NHL games, currently the 88th-highest total in league history. “What Sam did this summer with Martin Pospisil, it was just tremendous. The amount of hours that he spent in the gym and on the ice, committed to really make an impact this year at training camp, it was noticeable.”
Indeed, you couldn’t miss him at camp — in a good way.
And Martin and Monika weren’t going to miss Saturday’s introduction. What a moment it must have been for them.
“It’s a good thing that I get this chance at 19 years old, at that young age, to play the home-opener and make the NHL roster,” Honzek said on Saturday morning. “It’s a big deal for me and I want to stay here as long as I can and fight for my spot to hold on the team for the whole season. Because I know I can play with those guys, that I can play at the NHL level. That’s why I put all the work in during the summer. I want to stay consistent and show that I should be an NHL player full-time.”