Patrik Štefan

Those who know me know that I don’t show a lot of emotion. You can’t tell how I feel at first sight.

At this particular time, however, I couldn’t contain the enthusiasm that overwhelmed me. I wore laughter all over my face like never before. It was completely spontaneous.

I was almost sure that Atlanta would pick me. They were originally supposed to pick second at the 1999 NHL Draft, but there were still some ongoing trade negotiations so I thought I would be picked early, but I didn’t think I’d be the very first one.

Behind the scenes, Vancouver was engineering a series of trades to secure the Sedin brothers, so the order was not clear until the last minute. Only when NHL commissioner Gary Bettman appeared on the stage to announce which team would select first, did Atlanta show up on the screen.

At that moment, I looked at my dad and grandad sitting beside me and told them: “Wow, I’ll be No. 1.”

Don Waddell, then-GM of the newly established Trashers, winked at me on his way to the stage. And once he said that their first pick in franchise history came from “the International Hockey League’s Long Beach Ice Dogs” I was clenching my fists in enthusiasm.

“Yes! I really am the first overall pick!”

When you go to the draft, you have expectations. I knew I’d be one of the first picks. That alone felt superb. But this? To be picked as the first one of all the players — that was something special. No one will ever be able to take this from me. My name just went down in history.

These thoughts were swirling in my head when I was putting on a Trashers jersey with my name and number 99 already sewn on it. I was thrilled. This was the moment when the first part of my dream came true. This was what I had been working for since I was a boy. This was the moment I had been focusing on for the past few years. This was why I had been going through all the discomfort since I was 11.

I was still in a magical enthralment during the standard interviews, which took place right in the arena in Boston where the draft was held. Then I boarded a private jet with people from the Trashers, and we flew to Atlanta to attend an event for thousands of people. The team was owned by Ted Turner, one of the most famous media personalities who, among other things, founded CNN.

He was a person who knew very well how to stage a show.

During the landing, it all dawned on me suddenly. The first doubts started to creep into the unconcealed enthusiasm.

Atlanta used to have an NHL team in the 1970s before the league left this city for almost 20 years. Now it was to return with all the pageantry. Everything was super hyped. And I was the player to become the face of all of this.

Not only the No. 1 overall pick. Not only the first pick of the team.

I became the overall first pick in Thrashers' franchise history.

When you aim to play in the NHL and you want to excel there, it’s great if someone believes in you to the degree that they are willing to build a team with you as the leader. However, I was 18.

“Holy crap, what am I going to do here?” I was asking myself while waving to cheering fans dressed in Thrashers jerseys with a smile on my lips. As if I kind of knew at that time that it was too much to bear.

Now, a long time after I was forced to retire, people say that I was one of the worst first picks ever. My most famous goal is the one that I missed. You know the story.

The excited boy who reached the top of the ice hockey world for a while in June 1999 had a dream of becoming an NHL star and playing more than a thousand games. In the end, he didn’t achieve either of those goals.

However, he still has something to be proud of.

Not many people experienced and overcame as much as him. And it makes perfect sense for him to pass on his experience to those who are now at the beginning of their journeys with high hopes as well.

People talked about me as a big talent ever since I can remember. I might have inherited something from my dad and grandpa, who both played ice hockey, though never on a professional level. The Greek-Uzbek blood from my mom’s side might have helped as well, but everything was definitely determined by my love for hockey.

Ever since I was a boy, I loved every minute spent on the ice. Those moments when I could skate on it, make a pass, or score. I stood out in my home team in Příbram, to the extent that I transferred to Sparta Prague already at the age of 11. I needed a more competitive environment among players with whom I could develop my sense of the game instead of taking the puck and playing all by myself.

A lot of people failed to take a similar step. When you join a team where the others don’t welcome you with an open heart and consider you a villager who wants to take their place, it might be overwhelming.

I, on the other hand, started to play with guys who were two years older and used to hearing that I had a bright future. Moreover, Míra Henyš, a hockey agent, took me under his wings and all his geese were swans. I personally don’t like when people talk about me; I don’t need to be in the spotlight. As a result of my performance and Míra’s eloquence on how good I was, I became well-known in the Czech hockey world while I was still in minor hockey.

My biggest worry at that time was if I would be standing in the bus again or if I could sit for once. I had to commute every day because Příbram lies around 37 miles away from Prague. My parents didn't want me to live in a dormitory, and I didn’t want to either. Moving to Prague wasn’t an option.

For the first, I had other siblings and the whole family with my grandparents lived in a big house in Příbram. For the second, we simply didn’t have money for something like that. I used to hear rumors about the god-knows-what-conditions I came from, but I remember situations when I would come home at 10 p.m. and see my parents mounting nuts on some devices to make an extra thousand Czech crowns to pay for my hockey sticks.

My strongest memory from the years spent in Sparta before I moved to the US is the every-day commute. I would take the bus from Příbram in the morning. It was one hour to Prague, then I’d take a metro to my school. From there, I would go to the rink where I had to wait for my category. After that, I had to quickly take a metro again to catch the last bus going from Prague’s Smíchov station to Příbram.

I was often at the end of the line of people waiting for the bus, so I didn’t see a free seat very often. Most of the time, I stood in the aisle, so tired that I would nod off with my head leaning on the arm I was holding the upper bar with.

I experienced all of this alone since I was 11. No one of my teammates had a similar journey. So, beside the moments at school or at practices and games, I spent all of my childhood with my own thoughts.

I didn’t have many friends either. For those in Příbram, I was the big-headed Praguer. I had the reputation of a braggart and a star, which couldn’t be further from my real personality. On the contrary, my problem always was that I was too humble. The guys in Sparta didn’t accept me as a part of the group because I didn’t spend time with them outside of the rink. Not that I would be bullied, but I didn’t feel like a real part of the team.

If it wasn’t for my love for hockey, all of this and all those never-ending bus rides would have been too much for me. It was a really big load for such a young child.

But I kept going thanks to a vision that I would achieve something in hockey. That it would be worth it.

During the weekdays, I had to endure the lessons in school before I got on the ice, which is where I felt the happiest. On weekends, my dad would drive me to the games. The drives back home were harsh. My dad is exactly that type of person who eloquently and intensively analyzed everything that I had or should have done during the game. I was afraid almost in advance of what he would have to say, and I prayed that my mom would accompany us so that I could at least sit in the back.

Even so, as soon as I hit the ice, all the worries were gone. Never, not even once, did I get tired of hockey. It never annoyed me. Even though I was exhausted and my mom had to help me a lot with my homework (especially at high school). Standing long hours on the bus after a long day certainly didn’t meet the needs of a proper recovery for a young athlete, but when it came to hockey, I never suffered from a lack of energy. Not even for training extra.

I never consulted with specialists or any fitness or skills coaches. My dad only told me that hockey players need strong legs and that running uphill was an ideal exercise. So, I found a hillside near our house (which is now full of buildings), laid out cones and sprinted around them, tried dekes, and worked on my acceleration.

I’ve never been an extraordinary skater, but my first three or four steps were exceptionally fast. I believe it was thanks to these hills. I used to go running there whenever I could. I was crazy; driven by self-motivation. The more I received from hockey, the more I wanted and the harder I worked.

And the better I felt on the ice later.

At around 14, I found out that there is something like the NHL and I was amazed by a Czech superstar player with long, curly hair named Jágr. I still have his book today. I began to fantasize about what it would feel like to play against him one day.

Czech ice hockey players were in great demand at that time thanks to the results of our national team and to our NHL players who left for the US after the Velvet Revolution. It didn’t take long, and people were talking about me as a draft prospect and even being one of the very best ones. One of the reasons was that I got a chance to play for Sparta’s A-team shortly after my 16th birthday.

I remember that I was terrible at the first training camp in Atlanta.

Totally rubbish.

I had never felt more pressure on me before. Not only because of the expectations from the fans but also due to the fact that I didn’t know if I would be able to join the camp until the very last days. The rookie contract rules weren’t as strict back then, so my agents tried to negotiate the biggest possible bonuses for me.

Do you want Patrik to be the face of your organization? Give him an appropriate reward then.

I didn’t care. I was 18 and did what they told me. The only thing I wanted to know was where and when I was supposed to show up and play hockey. I was spending the end of the summer in Long Beach, my previous club, where I had found a girlfriend who later became my wife. And I waited.

The contract was finished at the very last minute, so I arrived at the camp basically not knowing what I was preparing for the day before. My mindset was not ready for what was ahead of me. The only thing I took with me was the expectation that, as a No. 1 pick, I had to be the best from the beginning. This expectation stemmed primarily from my mind.

But I wasn’t the best. Far from that.

I didn’t stick out; I could see that very well. The players around me might not have been such big names, but they had experience. They were going for it head-on and fought for their spot. I, on the other hand, was tied and stressed that things didn’t go according to my assumption.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, the lengthy contract dealing also had an impact. The expectations were already quite high, and people began to have thoughts like: “Well, you’re the No. 1 pick and you extorted big money, so show us what you’ve got.”

I never felt this kind of pressure from the coaches or team management. We always talked about professional things during my career in Atlanta. Yes, they wanted me to improve in certain aspects of my play, but everything concerned the game. I had never heard from anyone that they expected more from me.

This stemmed from the surroundings. From the media, the fans.

And from myself.

Of course, I wasn’t the first rookie to experience high expectations. In such situations, the biggest help can come from your teammates. It happens even today that No. 1 draft picks don’t have plenty of points in the first season. But they play on a team where they’re not the leader. I, on the other hand, joined a team that was being built from scratch, and everyone did all they could to secure their spot. The team did not have any inner hierarchy or locker room culture. It had neither an identity nor veterans who would be the core of the team.

On top of that, the NHL rules weren’t as generous towards new teams back then, meaning our team consisted of unwanted players; of players who would have been on the edge of the lineup or even beyond on other teams. It was the first NHL experience for our coach Curt Fraser, too. He was an amazing guy with a huge career as a player, but even he had to learn how to cope with this new role. Especially on a team that was losing one game after another.

We were terrible, but people had unrealistic expectations.We were worse than the most pessimistic estimates. We were a laughingstock. We won only 14 games the whole season. There are not many worse results in the modern history of the league. We scored only 170 goals, and allowed 313 goals. We were the worst team in all the stats by far.

You can make it through a losing streak, it happens to everyone, but for us, it was a routine. For example, after New Year, we lost 12 games in a row, and were to play Colorado, one of the best teams with players like Patrick Roy, Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg and Adam Foote. We thought there was almost no way we could defeat a team like that.

And yet we beat them, 4–3. For me personally, it was one of the best games in my rookie season. Total elation. And then, bang, another 11-game losing streak.

It was deadening. The NHL season is super long. You are traveling all the time, and when you keep losing, it gets in your head. I came from Long Beach where we had top teams. I was used to having success even in Sparta, and then suddenly this.

Most importantly, I was the one that people pinned their hopes on. Considering my age and the environment I joined, it was complete nonsense.

The very beginning couldn’t have been better. My first game for the Thrashers came against New Jersey in front of a home crowd. I went for a quick counter attack and passed the puck to my winger Kelly Buchberger who beat Martin Brodeur with a one-timer.

The first goal in franchise history, and it was our captain who scored it with me assisting. This was how people had envisioned it.

We lost that game. A few days later, we allowed seven goals to Detroit with their packed roster and we were set to face the last team of our three-game opening home series. Buffalo was a Stanley Cup finalist from the previous season with Dominik Hašek in the net. I would hear questions about when I would finally score my first goal, and I told myself that this was not going to happen that day for sure. I thought I would simply have to wait.

Then I lit the lamp twice, adding one apple and helping the team gain our first point for a 5–5 tie.

Considering the level of the other teams and our poor quality, it was a superb performance from my side. But this pace was unsustainable. It simply wasn’t possible. We were bad, and I wasn’t that type of player who would take the reins and lead the team. Not at the age of 19, in my first season. I was simply a different type of player.

I wasn’t the fastest skater, didn’t have the best technique for one-on-one, and I didn’t stick out in individual skills. My shot? Maybe smart, neat, but nothing extraordinary. No unstoppable one-timers. My specialty was hockey sense. I had a great feel for the game. I could accommodate my teammates, make a nice pass. But to be successful like this, you need like-minded players. I had such teammates in Long Beach where I had played before being drafted. That’s why I was thriving there. They helped me, and I helped them.

In Atlanta, however, I played with guys from the third or fourth line at best, they were no extraordinary talents.

At the beginning, I played with the aforementioned Kelly Buchberger, who was a great companion, a natural leader and an old stager, having played in the NHL for several years and won two Cups with Edmonton. However, during his career, he was a grinder and enforcer. His style was physical, straightforward. With my style, our chemistry frayed around the edges. It didn’t work out for us.

Today, I know that I made a mistake by bringing my girlfriend from the start. I should have waited and lived with one of the older guys for a year or two as rookies often do. The common rides to the rink or dinners are ideal for the rookies to naturally gain experience from the old hands. They explain to you how it works; how to react in certain situations.

But Kelly communicated with me a lot anyway. We used to spend time together during the trips. He tried to help me as much as he could, showing me the rules of the NHL. That applied to older Czech guys as well ; there were many of them at the beginning in Atlanta.

However, no one had to deal with the same thing as I did. They didn’t know what it was like to be the face of the franchise; to deal with the pressure from people who expected you to be the star they could admire.