It’s time to get your taste buds ready. After an unsuccessful season in the NHL, Palat dreams of a championship in Prague and is looking for tickets

The national team coach Rulík repeats like a spinning wheel that nobody is certain of anything, and the players choose similar rhetoric. But it is hard to imagine that Ondřej Palát would have experienced the championship in Prague in the same way as he did nine years ago – then due to the long playoffs in the NHL – only in front of the television, or that he would have gone to see the Slovaks in Ostrava, not far from his native Frýdek-Místek, as it was when he was thirteen in 2004. “That was a great experience for me.”

At the age of 33, Palát is one of the key pillars of the hockey team, he is counting on the championship, after all, after the end of the regular season, he talked about it overseas as a done deal. “It’s every player’s dream,” he confirmed now in Brno, where he joined the training. And he admits: “I will also need a lot of tickets. I’m not solving them yet, but I have friends and family who would like to come and see. It’s good that there are enough matches in the group, so it will be divided somehow.”

Also due to the fact that during his big engagement in Tampa he mostly fought until the last moments for the Stanley Cup, participation in the world championships eluded him. He was only in Bratislava in 2019, where the team lost bronze in a penalty shootout with Russia. “It was a great tournament that I have great memories of. The same applies to Sochi, where I was very young, Czech legends were there and I enjoyed it. Similar to the World Cup,” he adds his perspective on other international events in which he participated in the national team jersey.

But this time the Stanley Cup will be without him. After last promising season, New Jersey did not break through there. “We have a young team and such successful seasons had to come after the previous one. It’s a failure because we expected to move a little further. But even then with Tampa, it happened that we didn’t advance to the playoffs once,” says Palát. “We have to play more defensively, we can’t just score goals and screw up defensively.”

For the last few months, he has played in the Devils line with Tomáš Nosk, coach Rulík has maintained this connection so far, adding the shooter Kubalík to them, which can easily be an elite formation even at the championship.

It starts in eight days.