VANCOUVER — Jaromir Jagr’s thick legs can’t stand up to 25 minutes of ice time a night any longer, and his revived mullet is a little thinner. A few creases are showing on a face that once adorned countless posters on hockey fans’ walls.
The best hands in the game? They haven’t aged at all, and one soft flick of them still can change a game in an instant. Or two.
Jagr, out of the NHL for two years and now a role player rather than one of hockey’s big names, scored a goal and set up another late in the second period and the Czech Republic repeated its 2006 Olympic hockey victory over rival Slovakia by winning 3-1 on Wednesday night.
Jagr, a five-time NHL scoring champion and two-time Stanley Cup winner who now plays in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League, flashed his former brilliance by creating goals on two of the six shifts he played in the pivotal second period of the Olympic opener for both teams.
“That was a lot of work,” Jagr said. “I have not played a game like this in a while. It is different hockey.”
Tomas Vokoun, the NHL save percentage leader for Florida, made 34 saves and Patrik Elias and Tomas Plekanec also scored for the Czechs, who took gold and bronze medals in the first three Olympics featuring NHL players.
The Czechs won despite being outshot 35-24 and failing on five of six power plays.
Jagr, once the youngest player to score in a Stanley Cup finals game at age 19 but now near the end of his career at 38, had barely played in the second period before putting the Czechs up 2-1. Jagr collected Roman Cervenka’s outlet pass inside the blue line and beat goalie Jaroslav Halak with a wrist shot between the pads at 17:56, not long after Marian Hossa hit a post at the other end.
“Every team is going to have to give him respect because he can make you look bad,” defenseman Tomas Kaberle said. “He’s our best forward and it showed. He’s so strong on the puck and he’s got such a quick release and he’s got such strong legs, when he has a step on you you’re not going to catch him.”
Back in the Czech Republic, where a million-plus fans turned out to greet Jagr and the Czech players after their breakthrough victory in the first Olympics featuring NHL players in Nagano, it probably felt like 1998 all over again.
Barely two minutes later, Jagr — his hands still among the most creative in the game — gathered Marek Zidlicky’s shot from the point on a power play created by Zdeno Chara’s hooking penalty and fed it to Plekanec for a goal with only two seconds left in the period.
“He’s excited about this tournament. He’s got lots of energy and everybody could see it,” Kaberle said.
Jagr appeared to be clutching his right hand in pain on the bench earlier in the period, but there was nothing wrong when he returned to the ice.
“All the guys know he is a big guy for us, he does huge things for us,” Plekanec said.
Jagr was inspired and energized throughout, clearly motivated by playing in what almost certainly will be his final Olympics. He also had to readjust to the NHL’s smaller ice after playing on the larger international surface in Russia.
“Hopefully, I’m going to get better,” Jagr said. “It was tough for me. For two years, I didn’t play on smaller ice. In the first period, bodies were flying everywhere.”
His Czech teammates, the bronze medalists in Turin after beating previously unbeaten Slovakia 3-1 in the quarterfinals, took their cue from No. 68 to control a talented Slovakian team that possesses 13 NHL players — including Chara, the NHL’s top defenseman last season.
With 29 NHLers between the teams — representing two countries that were joined until 1993 — this was easily the best matchup of the first two days of the Olympic tournament. Both countries turned out large blocks of fans, the first time in the Vancouver Games that red-and-white Canadian maple leafs weren’t dominant in a noisy Canada Hockey Place.
The fans held up multicolor signs, hoisted huge flags, danced and sang during a party-like night in which Jagr turned back the clock nearly 20 years to his prime, when played alongside Mario Lemieux in Pittsburgh to form one of the NHL’s best scoring duos of the last half-century.
Elias, the Czech captain, scored by redirecting Martin Havlat’s shot from a few feet inside the blue line past Halak at 9:02 of the first.
Right about then, Slovakia was experiencing a flashback to 2006. Slovakia was the surprise of the Turin Games, blowing through its pool with a 5-0 record before stumbling in the quarterfinals against the Czechs, the rivals against whom they most hate to lose.
They still do.
“Every time you touch them, they go down,” forward Pavol Demitra said. “It was embarrassing. It looked like they were playing soccer. Maybe we have to start diving, too.”
Slovakia reunited the unit of Hossa, Marian Gaborik and Demitra from 2006, only four days after Demitra found himself on the Vancouver Canucks’ fourth line. Gaborik missed two games and most of a third for the New York Rangers before the Olympic break with a deep gash in his right thigh that occurred in practice, and Hossa played despite a recent concussion.
The Slovaks’ top line didn’t take long to produce, either, with Gaborik beating Vokoun to the stick side with a wrist shot that knuckleballed past the Czech goalie 47 seconds into the second period off Hossa’s pass from down low to tie it at 1.
Slovakia had a chance to take the lead slightly more than two minutes later, but Vokoun turned aside Hossa and Gaborik during a power play.
“We had lots of good things tonight, but we got into penalty trouble and that made a difference,” Hossa said. “It gave them too much momentum.”