On a New Team and With Actual Opportunity, Lukas Jasek is Thriving

Back when he was drafted by the Canucks in the sixth round, 174th overall, in 2015, former Canucks Army writer Cam Lawrence predicted that “Jasek may very well be the biggest late round steal of the 2015 NHL Draft”. In the intervening time since that article was written, his stock seemed to be falling precipitously. Now it appears that Jasek is determined to turn that narrative around.

You’ve probably heard this before, but one of our most running jokes last season was that locating Lukas Jasek was like playing a game of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? We’d be following a trail of clues using twitter, word of mouth, and a variety of different websites to try and locate where the Canucks prospect was on a weekly basis.

Jasek played for three different teams in three different divisions of the Czech hockey system last season, as well as participating in international play. He had by far the most success in the tier 2 WSM-Liga, putting up 28 points in 30 games for Frydek-Mistek. It was an awfully stark contrast from the zero points in 16 games he managed with HC Trinec, one tier higher in the Extraliga.

However, opportunity played a major role in that. Jasek was often treated like a spare player, only on the roster because the Extraliga rules require the teams to have at least two junior aged players at any given time. For most of those players, their presence is an inconvenience to team management, and the players are deployed in a fashion that mirrors that thinking.

In the table below I have laid out Jasek’s time-on-ice in each of his last three seasons in the Extraliga, as when as how that ice time was divided through various manpower situations.

This season with the White Tigers, Jasek is averaging 13:33 per game, a jump of nearly five minutes each night over last season, and he has appeared in each of his team’s games so far. The results have been excellent.

Jasek has accumulated two goals and five points to this point. The two goals tie a career high he set in 2015-16, while the five points top his previous high of three, also set in 2015-16. And this year, he’s done it in just nine games.

His production is impressive not just compared to his previous seasons, but he a legitimately important player for Liberec this year. He is tied for the team lead in points, but tallied his is markedly less time. As a result, he leads the team in all situations points per hour by a wide margin.

As seen in Table 2 above, a major reason for the jump in overall ice time is that Jasek is being fed steady power play minutes, and in turn, he’s rewarding his team. His three power play points are also tied for the team lead, and he’s second in power play points per hour. This does take a bite out of his even strength production, but the young Canucks prospect is still sixth on the team in 5-on-5 points per hour.

Rate production isn’t the only area in which Jasek is performing well this season. The Czech hockey homepage has added Corsi to their statistics tables this season, and they show Jasek in the black in terms of shot shares (a Corsi-for percentage of 51.2%), as well as a positive value relative to his teammates (+3.9%). His 12.3 shots on goal per hour at 5-on-5 rank third on Liberec, while his 5.1 scoring chances per hour rank second.

This is before we even touch on Jasek’s performance in the Champion’s League tournament, in which he currently has five points in five games, after a two-point game earlier this week against HC Davos of the Swiss National League A.

As with every article written in October, there’s a sample size alert: Jasek is only nine games into the Extraliga season. There’s no guarantee that he’ll continue to score at this pace. Still, even if he doesn’t manage another point for the rest of the year, there’s no taking away the fact that he’s already set a career high in points, and that alone speaks to the good that a change of scenery has done for him.

There might be a little bit of regret on Vancouver’s end that the aforementioned change of scenery was merely to another team in the Czech Extraliga. We know that the Canucks have made a couple of attempts to bring Jasek to North America, and as of yet they’ve been unsuccessful.

Jasek himself admitted last summer that both he and the Canucks had attempted to get him picked in the CHL Import Draft, but it appears that HC Trinec wasn’t having any of it, as he told our own J.D. Burke:

This is disappointing not only for the fact that they couldn’t bring him over, but also because the team that had his rights hardly used him the following season.

As a European player, Jasek would have been able to play in Utica from the age of 18, if it weren’t for his contract with Trinec. With that expired, there was an opportunity to bring him to the AHL in 2017-18, and the Canucks were clearly interested in doing so.

Instead, Jasek inked a two-year pact with Liberec to stay in his home country. While that has led some to believe that he’ll be sticking in Europe for good, let’s not forget that Jasek is still just 20-years old, and only recently at that. He’s just one year older than Olli Juolevi, and the same age as Petrus Palmu, two players who were in North America and have now gone to play in Europe. The obvious assumption is that those two Finns will return, so I don’t see any reason to close the book on Jasek just yet.

With the resurgence in his play as a result of the actual opportunity that his new club has given him, Jasek has firmly reestablished himself on the radar of Canucks prospects. Not only do we finally know exactly where he is, we’re getting his message loud and clear.