Maxim Strbak scored at 2:55 of overtime to give Slovakia a 5-4 win over Kazakhstan this afternoon at TD Place. It came with a sigh of relief because the Slovaks held a 3-0 lead in the first and a 4-2 lead with five minutes remaining and a five-minute power play. But the Kazakhs stunned their opponents with two late short-handed goals to send the game to OT and earn a vital point in the standings.

"I saw a bouncing puck and an opportunity to join to rush and luckily it turned into a breakaway," Strbak said. "At that point, I'm not sure what I saw, but I know I wanted to go five-hole and it worked out. We shouldn't have gone to overtime. That's on us. We need to do better. But at the end of the day we're happy we secured the victory and a spot in the quarter-finals."

Linemates Dalibor Dvorsky and Juraj Pekarcik each had two goals and two assists for Slovakia.

"It's tough to find the right words for this game," Pekarcik admitted. "The first period was good, and then we stopped playing hockey. We got scared. But we'll try our best to win the quarter-finals. We played a good game today. Yesterday me and Dal had a little talk to see what we have to do better. We have to keep going."

It was Slovakia’s final game of the preliminary round, and with a 1-1-0-2 record and five points they will advance to the quarter-finals which will be played on Thursday. For Kazakhstan, winless in three games, they are down to one final chance. They play Switzerland tomorrow. The winner of that game will also advance to the playoffs; the loser will have to win a relegation game to avoid being sent down to Division I-A for 2026.

 

"We still have one game left," said Kazakh forward Alexander Kim. "Today's game doesn't matter any more; we just have to focus and work on fixing our mistakes. We put up a good fight today. When you score some goals, you get confidence for your next games, so it's only a positive that we scored so many today. Guys have the feeling they can score now. But we have to start playing right away, from the first minute of the game, so we're not down 3-0 and fighting to get back in the game."

It was no surprise that the Slovaks were led by their captain. Dvorsky, a St. Louis Blues prospect, is playing in his fourth World Juniors and leads the team in scoring with seven points. 

Today, he scored the first two goals of the game to point the team in the right direction. The opener came at 8:07 after a faceoff win in the Kazakh end. Daniel Jencko stole the puck behind the goal and put it out front to Dvorsky. He outwaited goalie Vladimir Nikitin and roofed a backhand with the goalie down.

Five minutes later, Dvorsky struck again off the rush. This time it was a nice feed from Pekarcik, Dvorsky snapping a quick shot under Nikitin’s glove for a 2-0 lead.

Kazakhstan had their best pressure after this but as has plagued them all tournament, they couldn’t find the back of the net. To wit, Semyon Simonov had a clear chance in front and shot wide. 

Slovakia seemingly put the game further out of reach with a power-play score with only 8.6 seconds remaining. This time it was a slick Dvorsky pass to Pekarcik, who wired a shot over the blocker of Nikitin to make it 3-0.

The Kazakhs tried to make a game of it in the second, scoring only their fourth goal of the tournament at 2:02 on a sensational individual effort. Artus Gross picked off a d-to-d pass at the Kazakh blue line, raced down the ice to collect the puck, and then beat Samuel Urban with a shot to the far side. 

Soon after, they came within a whisker of tying the game when Beibarys Orazov drilled a shot off the crossbar on a power play. That narrow miss was all the more frustrating when Slovakia reclaimed their two-goal lead thanks to the Dvorsky-Pekarcik combination. This time it was another nice pass form the captain, and Pekarcik finished with a high shot at 12:36.

Kazakhstan made it 4-2 late, however, on a similar shot as Gross’s. Assanali Sarkenov beat Urban to that blocker side again, giving Kazakhstan a bit of life heading to the third.

The game got ugly with just under five minutes left. Sarkenov took a major and game misconduct for a nasty cross-check to the face of Frantisek Dej, but it was Kazakhstan that scored short-handed to make it a 4-3 game. Davlat Nurkenov stripped Matus Vojtech of the puck in centre ice and went in alone, beating Urban between the legs and making the end a lot closer than Slovakia would have liked.

Then, with only 28.5 seconds left, the impossible happened--Kazakhstan scored another short-handed goal. It came on a similar play, a turnover at the Kazakh blue line, and this time Kirill Lyapunov scored five-hole to make it an improbable 4-4 game. That set the stage for overtime and Strbak's heroics.

https://www.iihf.com/en/events/2025/wm20/news/65048/slovakia_advances_to_playoffs