PRAGUE — Always smiling, always as friendly as can be, the sense you get with Tomáš Hertl is he never has a bad day.
“He’s always happy,” former San Jose Sharks teammate William Eklund said.
But Hertl wasn’t happy after last season came to an end.
It took him a while to get over it.
Not just the resting the body part. The resting the mind part.
Hertl is a proud hockey player who had performed at a high level for 11 years in San Jose. But after debuting late last season for the Vegas Golden Knights and registering four points in six regular-season games, Hertl just couldn’t rediscover that powerful, down-low game during a one-goal, 14-shot playoffs that ended with the Golden Knights suffering a first-round exit to the Dallas Stars.
“I wasn’t good at all,” Hertl said at last month’s NHL media tour in his home country of Czechia.
Hertl understands why, as hard as it is for him to accept. He was coming off knee surgery, then suddenly had to get acclimated to a new team for the first time in his career: many, many new linemates, including nine different line combinations with 11 different players, and new systems.
These guys may be pros, but they’re not robots, and change is hard.
As Eklund said, Hertl “was San Jose.”
“I know I can be better, and I will,” said Hertl, who was outscored 5-0 in 111 minutes at even strength while on the ice in the playoffs.
One person who can relate?
Jack Eichel.
Traded to Vegas after seven years with the Buffalo Sabres, Eichel didn’t feel his normal self after debuting following an artificial disk replacement. He scored 14 goals and 25 points in 34 games after debuting in February of 2022, but it was the next season where he averaged just under a point a game, scored 27 goals and then added another 26 points in the playoffs during Vegas’ Stanley Cup run.
“I was in a similar situation,” Eichel said at last week’s NHL media tour in Las Vegas. “You get traded in the middle of the season, you’re coming off an injury, you’re rehabbing, and you’re trying to get accustomed to living in a new place while being in a new environment. Here’s a guy who had spent his whole career in San Jose, and all of a sudden now he’s thrown into a whole new mix.
“He’s trying to establish himself for what has made him successful as a player. At the same time, he’s trying to fit in with our group. So anyone that knows him knows he’s just like a phenomenal human being. And he fit in right away off the ice, but, he’s trying to get accustomed to a new system and maybe a different role than he might have been in.
“So I would expect him to come in and be the Tomáš Hertl that we’ve seen for however many years he’s been playing. We have a ton of confidence in him. And I know he had a huge summer of training and getting himself back. It’s not easy to come off an injury. I think he’s gonna be a huge part of our team this year.”
Kelly McCrimmon couldn’t agree more.
“He got in six regular-season games, which was a tough way to try to hit the ground running with a new team when you get the playoffs against a really good team as Dallas was,” the Golden Knights general manager told The Athletic. “Tomáš would be more critical of his play certainly than we would. But I also do believe that starting fresh at training camp is going to be really beneficial for him.”
While Hertl is 30 now and Vegas fans have the luxury of rooting for a franchise that is always in win-now mode, McCrimmon didn’t just trade for Hertl for the short term. He’s under contract until 2029-30 and the Golden Knights have him at a bargain $6.75 million a year because the Sharks retained 17 percent of his salary and cap hit.
So while Hertl may have gotten off to a rusty start, he worked hard this offseason to get healthy, regain strength and come into Vegas with a fresh mind and body.
Off the ice, he’s loved his time so far in Las Vegas, buying a house with his wife, Aneta, hitting it off with captain Mark Stone while Stone was recovering from a lacerated spleen, and feeling comfortable with the coaching staff, especially assistant Joel Ward, his former teammate in San Jose.
“He’ll have a really important role on our team and he’ll have a lot of responsibility,” McCrimmon said. “We would hope he plays as good for us as he did against us because he was a player that we had a lot of regard for. And really high character, size, strength.
“We felt at the time of the trade that he was a little bit different than what we had in terms of just his ability around the net, below the goal line. He’s really strong in those areas. So it complemented what we already had in place, and I think he’ll be a really good player for us.”
To McCrimmon’s point, while with the Sharks, Hertl scored seven goals and 16 points in 27 regular-season games against the rival Golden Knights and a torrid nine goals and 13 points in 13 playoff games against his now-current team.
This is only part of the reason McCrimmon worked long and hard to pull off the complicated trade.
“There were a lot of layers to it because of the no-move, because of (Sharks GM) Mike (Grier) dealing with his ownership, making that decision because he’d been a lifetime Shark,” McCrimmon said. “It just was a process that took quite a bit of time to work through. Then the retention was another whole part of it. It was a different negotiation all on its own, pretty much, that was time-consuming in large part because the no-move (meant) you’re dealing with the agent for the player.”
Hertl expects to get back to form this season and expects the Golden Knights, as long as they’re healthy, to regain their powerhouse form. Some critics are projecting a step back due to the loss of players like Jonathan Marchessault and Chandler Stephenson, but Hertl doesn’t see it that way.
“Some people are saying the changes will impact the team negatively, but I think we still have a strong core,” he said. “Obviously missing Marchy is huge. He’s a huge goal scorer and an all-around star. For the short time I was there he was great in the room, super-fun guy, lots of jokes, and everyone liked him.
“But we’ve still got some of the best defensemen in the league as well as (Adin Hill) proving how truly good he is. The biggest change will be up front, so I want to show people I can still perform like I did in San Jose, if not better. With this being said I believe we’ll still be competitive and will remain at the top.”
And that’s what McCrimmon expects as well with Pavel Dorofeyev, Brett Howden and possibly Brendan Brisson stepping into larger roles and Alexander Holtz and Victor Olofsson brought in.
“We like our team,” McCrimmon said. “We’ve got real good centers, real good defense, strong in goal. We think that we’ve got opportunity for some players on the wing to step into larger roles with more responsibility.
“And don’t forget how we were founded. We were a team that gave guys more opportunity than the team they came from. And a lot of those players blossomed into really good players. So there’s that aspect to it for us. We’ve got some players that we’ve brought in, some players within our organization that we think are going to round out our forward core. Our D, one through eight, are solid. Our goaltending is solid. We would wish for better health; I think (that) would be a big thing for our team this year. But I’ve always found in my, I guess this is going into my eighth year, we’ve always been at our best when we’ve got something to prove. That’s a bit of the DNA of this organization. We’ve, I think, been at our best when that’s the way we’re positioned.”
But McCrimmon and Hertl know a lot of Vegas’ success will depend on Hertl looking like, as Eichel said, the Tomáš Hertl of old.
That’ll happen, former Sharks teammate and fellow Manchester United fanatic Fabian Zetterlund vowed.
“He’ll be one of the best for Vegas, for sure,” Zetterlund said.
(Top photo of Tomáš Hertl by Derek Cain / Getty Images)
