The 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy have begun, friends, and the Calgary Flames have one player representing them in the men’s hockey tournament: forward Martin Pospisil, with the Slovakian national team.

It’s a pretty big accomplishment for the 26-year-old winger, who’s going to be one of just seven NHL players representing Slovakia – along with defenders Erik Cernak (Tampa Bay), Martin Fehervary (Washington) and Simon Nemec (New Jersey), and forwards Dalibor Dvorsky (St. Louis), Pavol Regenda (San Jose) and Juraj Slafkovsky (Montreal). It’s the fifth different major event he’s played for his national team, following the 2017 Under-18 Worlds, the 2019 World Juniors, the 2024 World Championships and the 2024 Olympic qualification tournament.

The 2026 tournament comes in a pretty unique time, both for Pospisil and Slovakia’s national team.

Slovakia returns to the men’s hockey tournament having won bronze in Beijing in 2022, and 11 players are returning from that team. But the 2026 tournament will see the return of NHL players, and Slovakia had pretty variable results during the prior era of NHL competition at the Olympics: they finished fourth in Vancouver in 2010 and 13th in Salt Lake City in 2002.

This time around, Slovakia is in Group B, joined by hockey powers Sweden and Finland and host nation Italy. All due respect to Italy, but Slovakia probably beats them. But the other two games will be tall orders, with Slovakia likely leaning hard on their veterans and NHLers to try to steal one of the two games against the powerhouses. All 12 teams in the tournament move onto the knockout stages, with the three group winners and the best second-place team moving to the quarterfinals and the remaining teams slugging it out amongst themselves for the other four spots. A win against Sweden or Finland could get Slovakia an easier potential path to a medal.

Given the circumstances, it seems unlikely that Slovakia will capture another medal in the 2026 tournament. That said, their national team program has a lot of exciting young players on the rise, so this could be the type of tournament where they get a statement performance against a traditional power that sets them up for success in 2030 and beyond.

For Pospisil himself, he scored a point-per-game pace at both the 2024 World Championships and the 2024 Olympic qualifying tournament, so it’s probably reasonable to hope that he can have a repeat of those performances. He’ll be someone that’s likely relied-upon heavily by the national team coaches in all game situations; we’ll see if he can rise to the occasion on the world stage.

The men’s hockey tournament begins on Feb. 11.

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