A Farewell to Radek Faksa and Unfortunate Millennial Summer Reflections

You’re new
‘Til you’re old
And everything’s warm
Until it grows cold

***

After July 1st, the Stars largely wrapped things up for the summer, barring Thomas Harley’s pending extension. And in order to make room for whatever Harley ends up getting, the Stars made one other move I didn’t mention last week: they traded Radek Faksa to St. Louis for “Future Considerations,” the terms of which I think we can now assume were fulfilled when St. Louis agreed to sign Ryan Suter in order to keep him from coming to the Stars’ training camp later this summer and glaring at rookies from the stands.

Back in simpler times, the Stars had another veteran near the end of his NHL career. That player was named Aleš Hemský, and he had the distinction of hailing from Czechia (formerly the Czech Republic), much like Radek Faksa. (Hemský also became friends with Marty Turco later in life, as well as fighting some demons at the end of his career that I think are worth your time to read about, so I commend this translated piece to you.)

Anyway, back to our hero. Faksa debuted in the 2015-16 season, and at the time, we were inundated with stories about how Faksa had courageously moved away from home at just 11 years old in order to pursue a hockey career.

How did Faksa handle that independence and freedom? Well, mostly by doing his homework, literally:

“My mom is pretty proud of me because I didn’t go wild or anything. I studied and she’s happy with me,” he told Hockey’s Future in 2013. “I think it has helped me with my life because I learned to do things on my own — I learned how to do laundry and shop for groceries, make food. It was pretty good for my future.”

And so it was that the party animal continued working hard. But it all paid off with Faksa earning the 13th overall pick by Dallas in 2012.

The timing of the pick allowed Faksa to attend the same Dallas training camp as Jaromir Jagr, which was nothing short of a dream come true for a Czech hockey player like Radek. But despite the incredible start to his time in Dallas, Faksa was drafted as a powerful two-way forward, and that wasn’t the sort of player Dallas was eager to rush to the NHL in the early days of the Jim Nill era. So it would be a few years before Faksa would crack the NHL roster, and when he did, he was grateful to have Hemský there to play Joe Pavelski to his Wyatt Johnston:

Ales Hemsky took care of me when he was telling me what to do,” Faksa said. “He was picking me up from practices; actually I was living with him in the same place. … You have to give it back to someone else, so it’s a nice feeling.”

I remember asking Faksa about his older Czech teammate years later after a game, and he mentioned how grateful he was to spend Christmas (I believe it was Christmas, if not Thanksgiving) with the Hemský family. I’d imagine that, for a player who spent a lot of his childhood on his own, a home-cooked meal never goes unappreciated.

But Faksa isn’t just a great interview and a hard worker; he’s also the sort of player who knows what’s important. And when he got a gift as inimitable as time with Aleš Hemský, he knew how to pass it along when his compatriot Matej Blümel was called up in 2022.

So Faksa drives Blümel around Dallas. He picks him up for practice in Frisco. He takes him to morning skate at American Airlines Center. They go to the games together.

Since both of Blümel’s NHL recalls have come when Texas was on the road (first in Milwaukee and then in Colorado), Blümel has been living out of the suitcase he packed for those AHL road trips. His car is still down in Austin.

So Faksa lent him clothes to wear and Blümel did laundry at Faksa’s place. Blümel said they would probably go shopping on Wednesday during the Stars’ off day in Fort Lauderdale.

“When I think about it right now, I have no words,” Blümel said. “It’s so nice from him that he takes care of me. I really appreciate it. I’m just so happy that I can have someone like him here.”

I say all this to point out just how much was packed into Faksa’s time with Dallas even before he signed his five-year extension in 2020. From sharing rooms to loaning out his wardrobe, this was a player who did all the hockey stuff without losing sight of the most important things.

Gratuitous Personal Anecdote: Back before the pandemic, I also asked Faksa about Czech Stop, the noteworthy kolache spot on I-35. For a player who spent time driving back and forth from Cedar Park in his debut 2015-16 season, Faksa gained a fair amount of familiarity with the pastry shop. His verdict? I can’t find the DBD piece where I mentioned it (so many of them are gone now), but I believe he said, “They’re good, but they’re just different from Czech kolaches. I don’t know how to describe it.” (NB: If a year of watching Anti-Chef videos on YouTube have taught me anything, that probably means a difference in flour and sugar type.)

But I digress. The point is, Faksa was a player it was easy to love, and easier to root for. Fun fact: his wife and two-year-old son left Game 7 against Vegas just a few minutes before he scored the game-winning goal. Bedtime is bedtime, after all, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to make the moment any less special for Faksa. What a way to cap his Stars career, eh?

But despite that shining moment, the glut of productive forwards in Dallas these days meant that Faksa’s cap hit was always the first place you looked when the Stars found themselves in a salary cap crunch, and even Jim Nill couldn’t avert his gaze forever. It’s a pity the Stars couldn’t keep Faksa for one more year, as he’s still a very useful middle-six player who has excelled whenever he’s not used like a top-line player. But the price of having a great team is making hard decisions, and one is pretty certain that Faksa will land on his feet, as he always seems to do:

Radek Faksa scored one of my absolute favorite goals in Dallas Stars regular season history – the rail slide along the bench on the zone entry:https://t.co/XiNr2qksf2

— Owen Newkirk (@OwenNewkirk) July 2, 2024

By the way, Radek Faksa has eight shorthanded goals in his career. I’ll bet you wouldn’t have guessed that.

***

Summer is a weird time once hockey finally heads off to the cottage for a couple months. News trickles in here and there, but it’s largely a space where fans take a breath and wander off to baseball and soccer games for a bit. The more leisurely pace of those games is a welcome respite after the grueling intensity of a playoff run, and I’ve already been to two baseball games in the past month. They were just what the doctor ordered.

Sitting in San Diego on a sunny afternoon was a joy. It’s a beautiful ballpark, and the downtown location makes the whole experience feel that much more real than games in Arlington, where the Rangers’ new stadium sits between a horribly overpriced theme park on one side and Six Flags on the other.

I’m a millennial, so it’s no surprise that I don’t love the way game presentation has gone in modern sports arenas. Maybe I was just spoiled last decade by Michael Gruber and Jason Walsh, who did yeoman’s work for the Dalls Stars in the nadir of the team’s bankruptcy era, the most important moment of which was killing Jason Hornberger’s phone battery. But wit and in-jokes have taken a backseat to a consistently seeker-sensitive products and safe choices in most venues, and even the AAC has caved when it comes to playing the same tired sing-alongs that every other arena does. Gotta grab a brand-new fan and get them to come back and spend more money next time, after all.

(Except, that wasn’t the case when Dallas went with its impossibly strange AI-themed playoff alien branding, but I still haven’t found anyone who can explain how the fake news report of an alien spacecraft landing on the AAC related to the mystery robot guy and the AI branding. Also, Victor E Green was a weird, darker shade of green. Thank goodness they pivoted away from AI later on. I guess they don’t always make safe choices, so kudos for that.)

Anyway, it’s certainly the case that arena/stadium/park DJs are pressured to “pump energy into the crowd” or whatever, and that means an incessant amount of noise (but only the right [read: loudest] kinds of noise) between pitches, stoppages, and plays, and I hate it. I hate being told to “get loud” when there’s no real reason to do so at that point in a game, and I really hate weird, nonsensical guitar riffs being blared in between every pitch in a shiny new ballpark with the roof closed on a beautiful opening day to perfectly rebound every bit of the stupid noise right back into my ears. Let the game sell the product, my friends. You gotta trust the process. Going to a stinker of a game without a lot of cheering is just part of the experience sometimes. No need to pipe in noise for noise’s sake just to pretend the product is better than it is in a given moment.

I realize that most baseball teams are run by ghouls who are desperate to maximize revenue (as if losing millions of dollars would affect any of them even remotely close to the way losing a thousand dollars would devastate the vast majority of people), and I realize that they are just trying to keep people engaged. I guess forcing people to look up from their phones these days is a sufficient end for just about any noise-making procedure, but I sure wish they’d stop stooping to childish tricks to get people to put away childish things.

Anyway, I’ll stop my out-of-touch ranting. I went to a Dodgers game last Friday night with my family for my dad’s birthday. It was a wonderful time of herding small children and large adults, but it was also lovely to hear how often the ballpark was allowed to just be a ballpark. It’s not the same, of course; there are more promotions than there were in my childhood, more ads on the walls and stands, more driving bass thumps than lilting organ notes. But for now, it’s still a beautiful ballpark that doesn’t let you forget the deeper joys it has to offer. For most of the night, it was simplicity itself to lean back in my chair and enjoy the view without feeling like I was being sold or told something. That’s one heck of a product all by itself.

***

The Dallas Stars will be streaming their games for free this fall. It’s huge news, equal parts revolutionary and risky from where I’m sitting. But goodness gracious, was it ever time to try something else. Bally Sports Southwest started with an awful scorebug and deep pockets filled with gambling revenue, and they ended with a streaming app maintained by a somnolescent mandrill and a mutual admission that Stars games on their bankrupt channel were a loss for everyone involved.

I don’t know if Victory+ is going to last seven years. In fact, I’d be shocked if we went even four years with it existing as purported, with just the Stars being streamed and no subscription costs being charged. Maybe it will be overrun with ads, or maybe the app will be just as buggy as Bally’s, but I doubt it. The Stars aren’t infallible, but this is a big enough move that I can’t imagine they would be making it without a somewhat viable business plan. In fact, it might even be a more viable business plan than their last deal, since subscription revenue is always built on a growth model. The Stars want to grow, and they’ll surely be monitoring every single thing you do on the app to see where they hook people and where they lose them, but one thing’s for sure: The Dallas Stars will not be relying on broadcast rights money for their payroll. That will either be a very good thing that other teams copy, or it will end up hurting their bottom line and their hockey ops spending down the road. I don’t really see how it can go any other way. But someone has to start the revolution, eh?

(Now, if you would just buy some more of those NFTs, we can continue providing this great service for free and paying Logan Stankoven’s rent. No pressure, though.)