Don’t look now, folks, but it’s a run on goalies! After using their 62nd overall pick on Czech goaltender Martin Psohlavec, they took a bit of break until late in Round 4 and used their 120th overall pick to draft… another Czech goaltender.
🔶 WELCOME TO PHILLY! 🔶
— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) June 27, 2026
With the 120th overall pick in the 2026 #NHLDraft, we are proud to select goaltender Marek Sklenička. pic.twitter.com/mJMmfxHyWo
And while Psohlavec presents as a bit of a project, Sklenička presents as even more of the same. He put up decent numbers in the WHL this season (a .902 save percentage over 42 games played with Seattle), but there are some concerns about some of his positional habits (particularly how he can make himself small in his net at times) that place some question marks on his ultimate ceiling.
Once again, though, we’ll toss it over to the folks over at Elite Prospects for a longer look at his game:
“Marek Sklenička has undoubtedly been one of the most fun goaltenders to watch this year – the Czech netminder will stop at absolutely nothing to make that save.
Sklenička boasts a solid frame at 6-foot-3 and solid footwork, squaring up well and maintaining his position when facing shots from the perimeter. He’s able to make those micro-adjustments when following play, but also flashed the explosiveness required to get across his crease to meet the play. This is all complemented by his elite motor, as he works hard for every stop.
However, Sklenička plays an athletic-first game, but doesn’t possess a meaningfully athletic profile. He struggles to make extensions and get pushes off laterally. It’s not much of a problem at the junior level, but he will struggle to find the same success overrelying on sprawling stops in future levels.
Right now, he’s banking on his elite motor to make saves, but he sacrifices technique and positioning in the process. That engine will help carry him, but he’ll need to keep himself in the play more consistently. Incorporating more of his scans into reads will help slow the game down for him – at present, he can abuse his reactions and footwork to get across. He can also struggle with rebound control, as he opts to get in front of pucks rather than direct them with his body.
Sklenička is a very solid junior goaltender with some NHL tools, but his game is riddled with junior goalie habits. It will take significant reworking of his game to develop him into a legitimate NHL prospect, including improvements in his tracking, play reading, composure, various technical aspects, and limb control. This makes him a tough projection to the NHL, even if his edgework, compete, and framing are strong. However, even if he goes undrafted, he’ll likely remain on our watchlist for future seasons, with the hope that he’s able to refine his playstyle into a more projectable one.”
There’s a lot to unpack with this one, still, but with the broadest of strokes, we’ll leave it here — there’s so much uncertainty with the prospects in this range of the draft, and this is the point where it becomes perhaps more productive to take some shots on upside picks, and build up the thinner areas of your pipeline along the way. They’ve added some more useful depth with Sklenička, and we’ll see over these next few years what their development staff is able to do with him.
