King on draft: Prospect reminds of Rinne
Posted June 23, 2011 11:05 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It didn’t take long for scouts to find the correlation.
Pekka Rinne was busy pulling rabbits out of hats in the National Hockey League playoffs, carrying a young, overachieving team in an unlikely run to the second round. A few weeks earlier, a young, Czech goaltender revealed those same rabbits by carrying his junior team in an unlikely first-round upset.
David Honzik, a 17-year-old rookie, was simply every bit as special during the Victoriaville Tigres’ run as Rinne had been with the Predators.
“A lot of scouts made the comparisons between both of them and I think it’s a true fact,” Tigres head coach Yanick Jean said. “(Rinne) was so good. I think Honzik was the same.”
It would be hard to argue the comparison. Honzik’s ascension on the biggest stage may have come as a bit of a surprise to many, including the shooters he stifled. Here was an import goalie that had struggled at times to find his game in his first tour of duty of hockey in North America, but shone brightest in the playoffs.
“The first half he had lots of ups and downs like any 17-year-old goalie,” Jean said. “You would never know what you’re going to get before a game. Second half, he had streaks that you would say, ‘Oh, my god. He won five or six in a row.’
“From the end of February to the end of the playoffs, he was just outstanding. The last six or eight games he played for us during the year he was phenomenal.”
Honzik carried that success over into a first-round sweep over the favoured Acadie-Bathurst Titan. The Tigres then gave the eventual MasterCard Memorial Cup champion Saint John Sea Dogs a run for their money in a tightly-contested five-game series.
“From what I’ve seen the last five games against us,” Sea Dogs head coach Gerard Gallant said following his team’s series victory, “he’s been as good a goalie as I’ve seen this year.”
Even Honzik couldn’t always explain how the puck managed to stay out of the net on some shots.
“Sometimes I have luck because I’m pretty big in the net,” the 6-foot-2, 209-pounder said. “Pucks just hit me. Sometimes I don’t understand how (I) stop pucks too.”
His quote is a fitting introduction. It’s not that he’s simply big — it’s that he’s aware and maintains solid positioning. But even further to the point, Honzik isn’t just lucky — he’s modest.
“He’s just so down to earth,” Jean explains. “He has a lot of confidence, but if you didn’t see him play you wouldn’t believe he’s a goalie. He’s a very mature kid. He knows what he wants.”
What Honzik wants most is to play in the same league as Rinne. Despite the allure the Kontinental Hockey League and the Swedish Elite League has on most Europeans, Honzik always set his sights on playing in the NHL.
Rather than staying home another year and letting the chips fall where they may, Honzik felt his best opportunity to draw attention from NHL scouts was to play where they lived so he made the trek across the pond to play in Victoriaville, Que.
Honzik knew enough English to understand when those around him were speaking, but couldn’t join in the conversation by the time he arrived. Playing in a Francophone community, however, brought about a completely new set of challenges.
“It’s more French than English,” he said. “My favourite (restaurant) is Subway because I can just choose what I want because they don’t speak English.”
His teammates helped him bridge the language gap, even if the lessons included “a couple bad words,” he says with a grin.
Honzik hopes his lessons in French continue with a Francophone mentor in the NHL. Although he begins by saying he doesn’t care which team drafts him, he can’t help but mention his desired situation. As a boy following the NHL at a distance in the Czech Republic, he liked country-mate Jaromir Jagr and his team, the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Jagr may be gone, but Honzik found a new favourite player on the Penguins: Marc-Andre Fleury.
“I like his style,” Honzik says.
And he should know — he can’t find a Fleury compilation on YouTube he hasn’t yet seen. But if the Penguins draft him, it means the young goalie could sit for a while, since Fleury is still just 26.
“I can be the backup goalie to him,” Honzik says, “waiting for my chance when he gets old (laughs).”
As composed as he is on the ice, Honzik would need to regain that composure if he meets his hockey hero. Before a game early in the season, Honzik was star-struck when he noticed another childhood hero in the hallway of a junior rink.
“I just stand there and he was watching and I said, ‘Wow, it’s Patrick Roy,'” Honzik remembers. “(Roy says) ‘hello’ and I was like, ‘Hi, what’s up?’ If I have to play for the Quebec Remparts and he would be my coach I don’t know what I’d do because he was my idol when I was young.”
Honzik may not know the answer, but we’ve learned it’s rather simple: he’d stop the puck.
“The tougher the game, the calmer he is in his net,” Jean said. “When the game is on the line, you know he’s always going to make the big stop.”
It’s no wonder he’s being compared to Rinne.
