Jakub Dobeš’ remarkable road to Canadiens built on one long shot after another

Over the summer, not long after Jakub Dobeš arrived in Montreal to prepare for training camp, to prepare to make a push to make the Montreal Canadiens, to start his NHL career, he went for a skate.

He was joined by Marc-André Fleury, who was preparing to play his 21st and final NHL season.

It was a fun time, Dobeš recalls, nothing too serious.

A few months later, as Fleury warmed up to play his final NHL game in his home province last Thursday, he noticed Dobeš stretching near the red line. And so, Fleury came over for a little chat with his one-time summer skating buddy.

“He goes just congrats, you’re playing well, keep going,” Dobeš said after that game. “I didn’t even know what to say, I wasn’t expecting it. I was just, ‘Oh, thanks.’ We know each other a little bit since we skated together, but I don’t think we are like best friends. So it can show you how much of a good human being, a good teammate he is that he takes the time to say something to a guy who started a month ago and he had probably met I don’t even know how many goalies in this league.

“It just means a lot for me to be able to share the moment with him.”

It means even more when you look at Dobeš’ backstory. How his hockey career looked grim as a teenager playing in his native Czechia. How no one in his home country seemed willing to give him a chance. And how he had to fly 8,000 kilometres to get that chance.

The bulk of Dobeš’ age-15 season was spent playing with the Czechia U16 league’s Piráti Chomutov, a middling team clear across the country from Dobeš’ hometown of Ostrava. He played a handful of games for the U18 team and even one for the U20 team that season and put up pretty good numbers, though he was not a dominant force.

The following season in 2017-18, however, Dobeš was at a crossroads. There were no options for him to play at home. No team wanted him, and finding him a place to play fell on the shoulders of his father, Zdeněk, a former goaltender himself, and, most notably, Dobeš’ agent, Miroslav Michalek.

Michalek was also a goaltender who played for Slovakia at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, and he was also the agent for a player named Ľuboš Bartečko, who played three seasons with the St. Louis Blues around the turn of the century and two more with the Atlanta Thrashers before finishing his playing career in Europe.

When Bartečko retired in 2016, he moved back to St. Louis, where he had met his wife during his playing days, and began coaching youth hockey with the St. Louis AAA Blues program. Bartečko was coaching the U18 team in St. Louis in 2017 when he got a call from his former agent about this goalie in Czechia who was young and talented and athletic and needed a place to play.

“Hey, I have this goalie,” Bartečko recalls Michalek telling him. “We’re having a really hard time finding a good team for him because he’s really good, I really like him, he has huge potential and he wants to go to the U.S.”

“I’d love to help him,” Bartečko responded.

But he had never seen Dobeš play and was not prepared to simply offer him a spot on the team sight unseen. No, Dobeš would need to attend spring tryouts.

“I can’t guarantee him a spot. I’ve got to see him,” Bartečko told Michalek. “He can come try out for U16, and then we can go from there.”

And so, 16-year-old Dobeš and his father got on a plane to fly from Ostrava to St. Louis to try out for the U16 AAA Blues, with zero guarantee of making the team. But what alternative did he have?

“Nothing,” Dobeš said. “That’s why I left home. I was never anything, really, back home. I was just a regular player.”

Dobeš arrived in St. Louis in the spring of 2017 to try out for the Blues U16 team, but the coach of that team already had two goalies. That coach? Hall of Famer Al MacInnis. One door was closed for Dobeš right off the bat.

That left Bartečko with a decision to make. His U18 team needed a goalie, but taking a 16-year-old — whom he had just met, who would be adapting to a new country and city at such a young age, living away from his family — would be a big risk. And it was an even bigger risk because Bartečko had no idea how to evaluate a goalie.

Enter Bruce Racine.

Racine played one season as a goaltender in the NHL, with the Blues in the mid-90s, but was originally from the Ottawa Valley and grew up a massive Canadiens fan. He would stay up to listen to games on a Canadiens transistor radio he still has to this day. When Racine’s playing career ended in 2003, he settled back in the St. Louis area and began a goalie academy. That was just before Carey Price’s career began with the Canadiens. Being such a big Canadiens fan, Racine began using Price as a model to train young goaltenders, as he still does to this day. Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Joseph Woll is one of his most successful students.

Bartečko asked Racine to give Dobeš a look and tell him if it was worth his while to take Dobeš on the U18 team that year.

Just think of how much Dobeš had riding on Racine’s evaluation. This was a major fork in his road.

“Obviously, he was an extremely talented kid. He had good size,” Racine said. “We had an opening, so it kind of made sense to take him.”

And that was all Bartečko needed to hear.

“I’m like, Bruce, what do you think? He was tall, he was big, he looked good, movement and everything,” he said. “And Bruce was talking to me and he was like, ‘That kid is legit, he’s going to be really good.’ And as soon as he said that, I was like, OK. I trust him. So I took him for my U18 team.”

That meant Dobeš suddenly had to prepare to move to the United States. They needed to arrange for a student visa and a school to facilitate that, all of which would be very expensive. And his little brother, Zdenek, would follow him to Missouri two years later.

“It was definitely, not tough years, but sacrifices were definitely made by my parents. A lot,” Dobeš said. “Because the money they invested in me and my brother, not only to pursue my hockey career but also to have a good education was a key. So, big thanks to my parents, because I always had a back door open if hockey didn’t work out.”

Bartečko helped arrange to get Dobeš a spot at Chaminade College Preparatory School, a Catholic school in the St. Louis suburbs, and the same school Florida Panthers star Matthew Tkachuk and Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum attended together just a few years earlier. Dobeš boarded at Chaminade that first year, learning English and getting ready to earn a scholarship while working with Racine on his game with the AAA Blues.

But there was a language barrier to cross there.

“One of the first times I was coaching him I was trying to explain something to him, and he didn’t understand,” Racine recalled. “So I got out my phone and pulled up Google Translate, I put a couple of key words in there and held the phone up for him. And one of the things I remember is I wanted him to develop good habits on a couple of the recovery drills we were doing, because he was always recovering on the wrong leg. I said, ‘You need better habits, you need good habits’ and he kind of looked at me. I said, ‘Do you know what habits means?’ And he said no.

“So I got my phone out, punched in habits, translated it to Czech, showed it to him, and he was like ‘Ohhh, OK.’”

The word “habits” would come to define Racine’s work with Dobeš over their two seasons together. The recovery drills he referred to were meant to correct Dobeš’ bad habit of always getting up on his left leg, even when he was sliding over to his right. Racine drilled that into Dobeš until he understood that was an inefficient movement and if he slides to his right he needs to use his right leg to get up so he can push back to the left as quickly as possible if needed.

Habits.

“Just the little things, over time, if you do them every day just become more natural. I would say that’s the meaning of habits,” Dobeš said. “He used it a lot. That’s why I remember it. I remember him saying it almost every day.”

Right from the beginning, Dobeš made it clear he had the work ethic to ensure those habits would get ingrained in him.

Bartečko, in addition to coaching the U18 team, was also coaching his son’s team, which was three age groups down from U18. And when his son’s team would practice, there was always a request from Dobeš to jump on the ice with them.

“He would be there, hanging out with the boys, and the kids loved him,” Bartečko said. “They loved him. He’s such a good guy.”

On the ice, roughly halfway through that first season, Dobeš took over as the Blues’ No. 1 goalie, but he still got passed over in the USHL draft. He returned to the Blues the following season, put up phenomenal numbers and was taken with the No. 80 pick by the Omaha Lancers in the 2019 USHL draft, the same draft fellow Canadiens prospect Sean Farrell went No. 1 to the Chicago Steel.

“There’s something about him that’s very determined to be successful,” Racine said. “He had a few doors that were opened for him and he’s taken advantage of it.”

Dobeš played 10 games for the Topeka Pilots of the NAHL before being called up by the Lancers and, by the end of the season, was taken with the No. 136 pick in the 2020 NHL Draft by the Canadiens, just two years after not a single team in the USHL drafted him.

“It’s a process that people don’t understand, and once you understand it and you own it and you go through those ups and downs, he was very focused. Every time he had a bad game, the next day he wanted work. Like at 6 a.m., he wanted to go back and just work right away,” Bartečko said. “I told my wife when he got drafted by the Canadiens that I wouldn’t be surprised if once he gets the chance, he will take it. Because I knew that’s what he did in youth. And you can’t teach that. It happened in AAA, it happened in junior, it happened in college (at Ohio State), and now it’s happening in the NHL.

“I told my wife, when they give him the opportunity, he’s going to absolutely take it, and he’s going to be good.”

When Dobeš beat the Dallas Stars on the road on Jan. 16, his fourth straight victory to start his NHL career, he very matter-of-factly spoke about his mindset playing in the AHL this season with the Laval Rocket.

And when you know his backstory, that mindset makes a lot more sense. This guy is wired differently. He is wired to succeed.

“When I was in Laval, I wanted to be here,” Dobeš said that night. “The one thing is I want to prove that I belong here, and the second thing is I kind of want to show everyone they made the right choice. There were a lot of days in Laval where I wanted to be here, so it was kind of a motivation to show everyone that maybe they were wrong.”

Now that Dobeš is here, does he ever think back to what might have happened if Racine didn’t particularly care for his goaltending style or thought he had no potential, or if Bartečko didn’t want to take a 16-year-old goalie on his U18 team? What would have happened then?

“I have no idea. Go back home, I guess,” Dobeš said. “I played at the highest level, but I was never on the national team or anything like that. There were other guys they liked better than me.”

Today, Dobeš says St. Louis is home for him. When he leaves for the summer, he does not go to Ostrava, he goes to St. Louis. That plane ride with his father back in the spring of 2017 was literally a life-changing experience for Dobeš.

How else would he have found himself warming up before a game only to have a future Hall of Fame goaltender congratulate him on his success?

“I have a picture in my phone with (Fleury),” Dobeš said. “I kind of learned what it takes to make it to the NHL from him. I’m kind of proud of myself that I made the progress where I can share the ice with him, and I’m really happy for him to close his unbelievable career at home. It was such a special occasion.”

Maybe one day, Dobeš can have a similar experience, but be on the other side of it — the veteran ending a tremendous NHL career and giving a pep talk to a young goaltender just starting his.

It’s a tall mountain for him to climb, but considering what he’s already climbed just to get here, no one should put it past him.