Slovakia finished its World Championship pre-tournament schedule on Tuesday on home ice in front of a sell-out crowd of 9,258 in Bratislava. The Slovaks lost the game 6-2 although the team wasn’t as bad as that score indicates – it was 3-2 halfway through the third period.

“We have to shoot more on goal, especially in the last period, and improve the little things,” said Juraj Slafkovský, who was playing his first game since coming overseas and therefore got a lot of attention from the Slovak media post-game. “But I believe that we will improve it before the tournament. We play the USA on Monday, so it has to be a different game from our side. We were right with them for the first two periods. I don’t know what happened in the third.”

Unsurprisingly, coach Craig Ramsay has reunited the trio of Slafkovský with Peter Cehlárik and center Marek Hrivík. Those three played together at key times during the 2022 Winter Olympics, when Slovakia won the bronze medal and Slafkovský was tournament MVP.

The top defensive pair for the game was Šimon Nemec with Martin Fehérváry, and it was that top five-man unit that produced both Slovak goals against the USA, with Slafkovský cutting into the deficit late in the first period and Cehlárik tying it early in the second. Fehérváry had two assists.

“I played well with them as always,” said Slafkovský. “They are good players. There is still room for improvement, even on my part. I lost a lot of pucks. On Friday (against Germany), we have to be 100 percent ready. Every mistake will cost us.”

But otherwise, he said: “I felt fine, I expected it to be worse. It went much better than I thought and it couldn’t be worse, which is good.”

After the game, GM Miroslav Šatan announced the 25 players who will be making the 290-kilometer (180-mile) trip to Ostrava on Wednesday afternoon for the World Championship, which starts on Friday.

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