Artem Shlaine's Journey from Russia to Texas--and Everywhere in Between
And taking one step at a time
In the first period of Dallas’s second game against the Detroit Red Wings propsects in Frisco this past weekend, 23-year-old center Artem Shlaine scored a goal for Dallas with a smart five-hole bid on the doorstep. (A moment also captured fabulously in Amanda’s excellent photo at the top of this story.)
Here’s the video highlight:
Detroit would respond with four straight goals before Dallas’s dramatic comeback in the third period to win, 6-5.
That goal just so happened to be Shlaine’s first as a member of the Stars organization. But it’s a goal with a long road behind it, and—he hopes—an even longer one still ahead.
Artem Shlaine is Russian-American. Born in Moskva, where his mother signed him up for figure skating when he was about six years old, Shlaine stuck with figure skating for about six months, until when his dad finally let him start playing hockey. And because had had learned some more technical aspects of skating earlier than many of his peers, Shlaine ended up being one of the best skaters on his hockey team—and thus, one of its best players.
It would not be the last time something that wasn’t his first choice ended up opening doors he never could have imagined.
Shlaine’s father has multiple degrees, and the importance of getting a good education was always a point of emphasis in the Shlaine household. But because of the structure of sports and education in Russia, youth hockey and a college education are mutually exclusive endeavors.
“It's not very well highlighted [in Russa], the college path in the U.S.,” Shlaine said on Friday after practice in Frisco. “Everyone knows about how you play juniors and play in the CHL, but nobody knows that you can go to school, get your education paid for, and play hockey. And also, now with all these NIL opportunities, you're also getting paid. It's unbelievable.”
It was Artem who made the final decision, at 14, to take that path. As a teenager, he moved to the USA to pursue his hockey career with a plan to play college hockey one day with his parents’ blessing.
If money had been no object back in 2017, Shlaine would have gone directly to Shattuck-St. Mary’s, the prep school that Shlaine (and many others) repeatedly name as the best youth hockey development program in North America. And considering that it boasts graduates like Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, and Jonathan Toews, you’d be hard-pressed to argue.
But because of the high tuition, Shlaine instead started his North American hockey career at the South Florida Hockey Academy, which is run by former NHLer Olli Jokinen—whom Shlaine says he still keeps in touch with to this day.
In retrospect, Shlaine says it worked out for the best. By starting in Florida, Shlaine played with a lot of teammates from other countries in Europe (though none from Russia), which meant all of them had to learn English together.
“We're kind of learning together sitting in class, not saying much at first,” says Shlaine, “But after the first five or six months, it gets easier and easier. I think the biggest key is you don't have anyone who speaks the same language as you.”
The only Russian Shlaine was speaking during that time was on calls to his family back home. Otherwise, all his homework, classes, and conversations were in a new language.
“Pretty much 11, 12 hours of your day, you're speaking English.”
During Shlaine’s time in Florida, a coach from Shattuck-St. Mary’s noticed Shlaine’s play—scoring 51 goals and 89 points in 62 games will draw some attention—and after speaking with Shlaine’s father, the school offered Shlaine a tuition package that made it possible for Shlaine to transfer to Shattuck-St. Mary’s the following year in 2018. Artem would spend his final two years of high school there, even turning down an offer to join the USHL after his junior year in favor of finishing high school at Shattuck-St. Mary’s.
Still, it wasn’t easy being a teenager living in a foreign country, as Shlaine freely admits. But he believes the lessons learned from jumping into a new place back then are still helping him even now, after joining the Texas Stars last spring.
“I think the toughest part,” Shlaine says, “is you're away from home, where your mom's doing your laundry, making your meals and stuff. Here, you're by yourself. But what helps, coming back to Texas, even, is you're in the same boat with other players. So you look at them and you learn from each other, and you adapt together and you go through the same stuff together.”
That camaraderie has been a pivotal part of Shlaine’s story at every stop so far.
“You learn from your mistakes,” Shlaine acknowledges, “But you also learn from their mistakes, right? So that helps a lot.”
After finishing high school in 2020, Shlaine was drafted by the New Jersey Devils in the fifth round. He also began his college hockey career at the University of Connecticut.
As often happens, the tougher college hockey environment did a number on his offense, which dropped from the prodigious totals he had been putting up in high school. Shlaine scored just one goal in his freshman year, with a minor improvement to seven goals and 10 assists in his sophomore season.
Shlaine credits that time at UConn with helping him to focus on becoming a better defender. Indeed, he profiles as more of a two-way center on paper right now than an outright scoring forward.
After two years at UConn, Shlaine opted to transfer to Northern Michigan University. And there, under head coach Grant Potulny, Shlaine’s offensive talents once again began to flourish, as he scored 32 points in 38 games his junior year.
“I transferred to Northern Michigan because I just wanted a little more opportunity,” Shlaine said. “I wanted to play offense, and I felt like transferring would give me a better chance to play professional hockey.”
Northern Michigan is also where Shlaine says he really started learning the finer details of how to play around the net and on the power play at a higher level—aspects of his game that likely appealed to the Texas Stars when they signed the 6-foot-1 forward earlier this year.
“That kind of opened me up more to playing offense and playing more minutes, playing more situations,” says Shlaine of his time at Northern Michigan.
But yet again, Shlaine’s plans changed, this time in his senior year, when he suffered a nasty MCL injury in February of 2024.
“I go to hit a guy, and he bounces off the boards, because the boards a little flimsy,” Shlaine said in an interview with ASU back in December. “And I’m turning back to back-check, and I feel something really heavy drop on my knee. So my MCL is fully torn at that point, and I know right away, I can’t skate.”
That was the end of Shlaine’s senior year, right before Shlaine’s family was scheduled to fly in to see him finish the season before turning pro. But as has tended to happen in Shlaine’s career, changed plans didn’t necessarily mean ruined ones.
“I wanted to go pro after my senior year, but I tore my MCL,” Shlaine said. “I got offered an AHL contract and it was like, you go either play pro—it was New Jersey's AHL team, Utica—or you can stay in college. And that's when NIL started coming around.”
Shlaine also had the option to play a fifth year of college hockey, as his freshman year came during the Covid-altered 2020-21 college season, which granted all NCAA athletes an additional year of eligilbity.
For Shlaine, that optioon in his career was a pivotal one. Once again, he had a choice to make, but this one came with the biggest risk thus far. Rather than signing an AHL deal, he opted to return to college hockey for a fifth year at Arizona State University, which meant New Jersey would lose his rights, making Shlaine an unrestricted free agent the following year.
Part of the calculus, for Shlaine, had to do with opportunity—particularly coming off a serious knee injury.
“If you go and play at ASU, you're getting minutes,” Shlaine said of his decision. “And you have a chance to earn a better contract. So that's kind of what I thought I should do, with my family, just everyone, with that decision. And I loved it.”
However, the risk of turning down the certainty of pro contract became immediately apparent to Shlaine that fall. His knee was back in order, but a fluke injury struck once again.
“At the first team practice, I break my foot at ASU,” Shlaine recalls with a wry smile. “Someone shoots a puck, and I break my foot. I'm out the first, six, seven games. And in the seventh game, guess who we play? Northern Michigan.”
And broken foot or no, there was no way Shlaine was going to miss a game back in Michigan against his beloved old school.
“I was playing. I don't think I was 100%, but I was playing that game, and I was really excited. That kind of made me work for my rehab.”
He would recover from the setback and return for both games in Michigan that weekend, as ASU detailed in a video with Shlaine and his parents.
“That game was definitely circled on my calendar, because we’re going back to Marquette,” Shlaine said. “The fan support was great there, and I got to talk to a lot of people that I knew from the couple years prior.”
The Sun Devils won both games that weekend, with Shlaine tallying an assist in his first game back. It was a moment that meant a lot to Shlaine, as did his time at ASU as a whole. Because he knows how fleeting time at any place can be.
“ASU kind of tied everything together and gave me all the confidence in the world,” Shlaine said on Friday in Frisco. “It also prepares you, because in pro (hockey), there's a lot of, like, you play for a certain team. You want to stay in the same place. But usually it doesn't happen that way, right?
“Like, you see the superstars get traded, and then other players get traded. You gotta be ready for those jumps. And so I thought coming to ASU and being a new guy helped me in adapting right away, and that helped me in coming to Texas and adapting right away.”
Following his season at ASU, Shlaine was honored in April as a 2024-2025 CCM/AHCA Division I All-American with Second-Team West All-America honors.
(By the way, Artem’s younger brother, Daniel, starts his own college hockey career at the University of Minnesota-Duluth this fall. No pressure.)
After finishing at ASU, Shlaine finally made that big jump, turning pro when he joined the Texas Stars on a professional tryout contract in March along with other free-agent signees such as Harrison Scott and Trey Taylor.
His sound, two-way game was evident in Texas. His offense didn’t pop right away—he totaled one assist in six games—but he also wound up +1 among a crowded Texas forward group. And as his play in Frisco showed this weekend, he’s still got the ability to do some damage around the net.
The transition to the AHL is generally viewed as the toughest there is, as you’ll often hear from hockey folks. Whether a player joins the American Hockey League from juniors, college, or overseas, it is almost always going to be the biggest adjustment of a player’s hockey career—often even moreso than the jump from the AHL to the NHL.
“It kind of comes at you quick. You got to adapt,” Shlaine said of his time in Texas thus far. “But we're all kind of in the same boat, right? All the college guys signed at the end of their seasons. They come in, and we lived in a hotel for two and a half months. It was fun. You get to meet your guys.”
Shlaine roomed with Harrison Scott in Texas, but he also had the advantage of knowing two other Texas Stars teammates a bit, too. Trey Taylor and Ayrton Martino (3rd round pick for Dallas in 2021) both played at Clarkson University, where Shlaine became familiar with them through a mutual friend at ASU.
“I kind of knew a little bit about them, and we got along pretty well right away,” Shlaine said. “We spent a lot of time together, you know, after practice and stuff, hanging out, whatever it is, getting food and whatnot.”
Yet again, camaraderie made a new place just a little more familiar for Shlaine. Still, he says it’s up to him to keep adapating every step of the way.
“Hockeywise, it’s definitely a step…going from youth hockey, and then you go play high school or travel, then you jump into juniors, jump into college. And you already know that the jump [to the AHL] is going to be something a little harder. Guys are faster, stronger, but at the end of the day, you're the player you are, and you're just going to play your game and adapt accordingly.”
In July, Shlaine signed his AHL contract with Texas, where he figures to start the year playing center for a team looking to make another deep Calder Cup Playoffs run next spring, under new head coach Toby Petersen—the same coach running the bench for the Stars prospects last weekend.
After centering one of Texas’s better lines in Sunday’s game against Detroit, Shlaine now has one more jump waiting for him in training camp: sharing the ice with NHL players.
But hey, what’s one more step for someone who has already taken so many?
Terrific article that I found fascinating from start to finish. What an amazing journey for that young man! And he sounds like a great dude. Hope it goes well for him in Texas.
So how is his last name pronounced? shlayne or shline?