How L.A. Kings goalie prospect Hampton Slukynsky led Western Michigan to its first Frozen Four

New York Times

08-04-2025

'The kid is almost make-believe as far as the quality of young man that he is.'
That's what Western Michigan University Broncos head coach Pat Ferschweiler said when asked about his freshman goaltender shortly before the Frozen Four.
It's the same place everyone starts when they talk about Hampton Slukynsky.
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Brett Skinner, his old head coach with the USHL's Fargo Force, talks about him as driven, professional, competitive and nice and that he has 'great work habits on a daily basis.' According to Skinner, he puts in extra time in the gym and goes 'above and beyond a normal player.'
Cary Eades, Fargo's general manager, says 'he's just flat out a winner' who is a 'great teammate,' an attribute Eades believes often gets overlooked with goaltenders. Where some goaltenders 'can turn their teammates off and get 96 or 97 percent from them,' Slukynsky, nicknamed Hammer by his, gets '100 percent plus' because of how well-liked and respected he is.
Jay Hardwick, his old head coach at Warroad High School, says the kid that Ferschweiler, Skinner and Eades all describe hasn't changed over the years, either. He has treated hockey like he was a professional 'since he was real young,' according to Hardwick.
Over time, it has paid off. Though he wasn't always viewed as a top prospect — he was drafted 128th in the ninth round of the 2022 USHL draft by the Force and 118th in the fourth round of the 2023 NHL Draft by the Kings — he has played his way into being one.
It started on a backyard rink in the small but legendary northern Minnesota hockey town of Warroad, and it now looks destined to finish in Los Angeles.
But first, he's got a couple of games to win in St. Louis and a first national championship to chase for the Broncos.
There are only about 1,800 people who live in Warroad, which is just south of Minnesota's northern border with the Canadian province of Manitoba.
Around town, everyone's got a backyard rink. Few have ever rivaled the one that Tim and Jenny Slukynsky built for their boys, though. It was the real deal, measuring 62 feet by 42 feet with full boards, lights, a small seating area, American and Canadian flags flapping in the wind and an old golf cart turned Zamboni. Growing up, there were times when the Slukynsky family home would run out of hot water for their showers because Tim needed to use it all to flood the ice.
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In games of shinny on the backyard rink, Slukynsky would follow his brother Grant and his friends onto the ice. He became a goalie because they were three years older than he was and thus bigger and stronger than him, too.
'When all of his buddies were over, I wanted to play and be out there and the only way I could play where it was fair to both teams was to stick me in net,' Slukynsky said on a phone call last week, chuckling. 'That's how it started and I just fell in love with the position.'
After years on the backyard rink, Slukynsky eventually graduated to the biggest thing in Warroad: Its legendary high school hockey team.
'Warroad is just a hockey town. It just is. That's what it was built on. A lot of their pride comes from their hockey and certainly their high school hockey program is as storied as any in Minnesota high school hockey history,' said Ferschweiler, a Minnesota native from about seven hours south of Warroad in Rochester. 'They've created some fantastic players up there. It's a lifestyle and all of Minnesota is but certainly in Warroad. They take it seriously and they've got a lot of numbers up there, but more than that, I think they do it right up there and are coached well from a young age as well.'
At Warroad High, Hardwick said, 'it just kind of kept building every single year where (Slukynsky) just got better and better and people started to notice more and more.' After playing well in five games as a sophomore, he was invited to USA Hockey's U17 camp. After going 26-4-1 with a .925 save percentage as the team's starter in his junior year, the Force drafted him.
That season, it was former Force goaltending coach Carter Krier (now an assistant at Ohio State) who saw him play and convinced Eades to select him.
'Krier would be someone who says he could see Sluky being where he's at,' Skinner said. 'It was projecting out high school hockey and you can go there and see the athleticism and stuff like that, but a lot of the times even the level of hockey might work against a goalie. Carter would deserve a ton of credit for it, but at the end of the day, you probably just get more lucky than anything. It's like drafting Pavel Datsyuk when the Red Wings did. It's like 'Well, if you were so good at it, then why don't you do it every year?' We're not picking off kids like Hampton in the draft all the time.'
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Eades also knew Tim and Jenny since before they were even married because he coached in Warroad for 11 years from 1993 to 2004, so he knew about the backyard rink, about how hockey oriented they were and about both their sons (Grant also played in Fargo for a year).
Instead of making the immediate jump to the USHL, Slukynsky returned for his senior year at Warroad High and led them to a 28-1-1 record with a .941 save percentage, playing well enough at the high school level and in spot starts with Team USA at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup and U18 Worlds, to convince the Kings to take a chance on him despite his relatively small sample of high-level hockey.
Hardwick still remembers the practices from the last two of those three seasons playing for Warroad High. Warroad's team was strong, with would-be Lightning draft pick Jayson Shaugabay and a number of other college-bound players. And when they'd work on their power play, Slukynsky turned it into a competition, refusing to let them score and feel good about it.
'Hammer would make saves that goalies probably shouldn't make because he wanted to make our power play better,' Hardwick said. 'He just kind of raises the level of everyone because if you're not focused and you're not bearing down, he's not going to let you score. And he comes to the rink every day with that attitude and it just carries over into games.'
He didn't jump right into college post-draft, either, instead finally joining the Force.
In Fargo, Slukynsky started his only season in the USHL in a tandem with the more veteran Anton Castro. Though they split the starts, with Slukynsky playing 33 games and Castro playing 31, the Force were almost unbeatable with their rookie goalie in the net, going 28-3-0. Slukynsky finished the season with a .923 save percentage and, despite the tandem, won USHL Goaltender of the Year.
'He rises to challenges,' Eades said. 'He's very quietly confident and he's calm in the net. There's no wasted movements. It leaves the coach or the GM feeling good about him being in the net.'
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In the playoffs, Skinner felt good enough to hand the net over to him, and Slukynsky led the Force to a Clark Cup title, going 9-3 with a .931 save percentage.
'The run that he went on in the playoffs for us speaks for itself. He's got ice in his veins,' Skinner said. 'He's a good-sized kid (he's now listed at 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds), which gives him a chance, but he's also very athletic. He's positionally sound and has all of the fundamental tools of goaltending, but what separates him are his athleticism and his competitiveness as a goalie. The second-chance efforts and sometimes with him the third-chance efforts that he's able to come up with because of his athleticism and his competitiveness is really what makes him have the success that he does.'
This season, as a freshman at WMU, he entered a similar situation to the one he walked into in Fargo a year ago. The Broncos were bringing back fifth-year Cameron Rowe, and Rowe started the first game of the season.
After playing all season in a tandem, Slukynsky became Ferschweiler's guy for the playoffs and into the national tournament. (He also went 2-0 with a .933 save percentage for the gold medal-winning Team USA at the 2025 World Juniors in Ottawa, starting against Latvia in the round robin and Switzerland in the quarterfinals.)
'I'm comfortable with both of our goalies, but I'm certainly happy that we have one of them taking charge and commanding the net and that's Hampton,' Ferschweiler said.
Entering the Frozen Four, he boasts an identical save percentage of .923 to the one he had in Fargo a year ago. He also stopped 28 of 29 shots in both of WMU's games at the Fargo regional, winning each 2-1 to lead the Broncos to their first-ever Frozen Four appearance.
'The thing that sticks out to me at all times — and it's just a feeling that you get right away — is that no moment is too big for Hampton Slukynsky,' Ferschweiler said. 'And his calm is exactly what you want from a great goaltender. Something goes by him, he doesn't change. He makes a great save, he doesn't change. A lot of that comes from his confidence in himself, but his confidence in himself comes from the preparation and the work that he puts in every single day. It's very impressive. He's got an extremely impressive approach to individual improvement.'
When Slukynsky looks back on his journey from being shoved into the net in his backyard to playing at the Frozen Four for a national championship at just 19, he says he 'wouldn't trade it for anything.'
Not the Warroad upbringing, with its backyard rinks and free ice time whenever one of the two local rinks was available.
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'It's a crazy hockey town up there,' he said, laughing again. 'That's kind of all you do from basically the time you can walk.'
Not this year, which he called 'kind of crazy,' and everything that has come with it; coming into college and not knowing what to expect; the big step up from the USHL to the NCHC, which he calls 'one of the best conferences in college hockey every night;' the dream come true at the World Juniors; and now another chance at a dream come true in St. Louis.
'Every year I watched the Frozen Four on Thursday and Saturday in April,' Slukynsky said. 'Now I get to play in it.'
This is also the first time that he's been able to play with his brother, who transferred to Western Michigan from Northern Michigan this year and is second on the team in scoring entering the Frozen Four. Because the freshmen at WMU don't stay in the dorms, he and Grant have lived together in a two-bedroom apartment on campus. Grant does most of the cooking, but Hampton insists they share the dishes, cleaning and garbage duties 'for the most part.'
'I'd say it's pretty even,' he argued.
From afar now, Skinner says that Slukynsky 'has definitely, even since I had him, taken a lot of steps.'
'We were certainly lucky to have him last year, and it has been awesome to watch what he's doing now,' Skinner said.
Hardwick says that what Slukynsky has done in Fargo and Kalamazoo in the two years since leaving Warroad doesn't surprise him.
'Being a high school kid from Minnesota, sometimes they worry, 'Well, how's he going to be at the next level?' and he has just proven people wrong at every level how elite of a goaltender he is,' Hardwick said. 'I don't think there's any doubt about it now.'
On Thursday, he'll get another chance to prove there's no doubt when he takes the net against the reigning national champions from Denver — a team he beat in overtime in the NCHC final just a couple of weeks ago — at the Frozen Four.
(Top photo courtesy of Western Michigan Athletics)