After his defection, his parents were denied a new apartment for which they had been waiting for years. Most difficult, he was leaving his brother and parents to the caprices of the Communist government he hated.

He was leaving behind everything he knew and knew he would probably never return. The decision to leave his homeland was a frightening one for Stastny. They left under cover of night and made their way to the airport where they boarded a plane booked by executives of the Quebec Nordiques, an NHL club. Their escape was like a story from a spy novel.

Stastny, his pregnant wife Darina, and his brother Anton defected while the Czech National team was in Innsbruck, Austria playing a tournament. 'This is when I realized, because they had total control and could manipulate you anyway they wanted, there was no future for me as a player or a person.' After much soul-searching, Stastny made up his mind to leave the country. 'To hear this, it was like someone poured icy cold water on your naked body,' Stastny told Eric Duhatschek of Toronto's Globe and Mail. He was warned that if his public statements did not follow the government line, he would be banished from the Czech team. Once on the Czech national team, his remarks criticizing political abuses in Czechoslovakia brought him into conflict with the Communist regime there. With the memory of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress democratization fresh in the country's memory, Stastny always played particularly hard in matches against USSR teams. At the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Games, the Stastny brothers combined to score sixteen goals for the Czech team in six Olympic matches. In 1976 they were members of the Czech team in the Canada Cup. They later played on the national team that represented Czechoslovakia in international competitions. Marian eventually joined the Bratislava team of the Czech league Anton and Peter soon joined him there. They played whenever they could, and all three developed into excellent players. Growing up in an ice hockey-crazed nation, Peter and his brothers Marian and Anton grew up with hockey sticks in their hands. Peter Stastny was one of four sons born to Stanislav and Franciska Stastny in Bratislava, a city in the Slovak region of Czechoslovakia. Of equal significance, when Stastny and his brother Anton defected from their native Czechoslovakia in 1980 to play in the NHL, they unleashed a wave of Eastern European players that changed the face of the league. Louis rank him as the second-best European scorer in NHL history. In the 1980s he was second only to Wayne Gretzky in points scored the 1,239 points Stastny scored during his sixteen-year career with Quebec, New Jersey and St. Peter Stastny was one of the dominant offensive players of the National Hockey League (NHL).

Cccp player for region