It’s not often that Canada has a bitter pill to swallow and acknowledge that it was not even close to being good enough to win gold at the World Junior Hockey Championship. After all, this is the nation that won five straight golds from 2005 to 2009.
But more recently, five different teams have won the tournament in the last five years. Canada has now won gold once in the last seven years.
Canada played its best game of the tournament, but came unglued at critical moments and exited Helsinki in sixth place after a 6–5 loss to Finland in the quarterfinals on Saturday. Canada’s 17-year streak of reaching the semis at the world juniors is over.
“I thought it was the best game of the tournament for sure,” Canada’s Mitch Marner told TSN. “We worked as hard as we could tonight. It’s a big disappointment coming out and losing this early.”
It was a case of last year’s gold medalist shooting itself in the foot with bad penalties, unreliable goaltending, insufficient production from veterans, and even questionable coaching decisions.
“You need your best players. You need a team to win,” said head coach Dave Lowry.
A team needs to have its best squad to win and this usually means an “older” group with many returning players. Canada had three 19-year-olds and four returning players, so that wasn’t ideal to begin with.
While Canada didn’t have the quality of the 2015 squad, it was still expected to compete for gold. In the end, the best this squad came up with left a lot to be desired.
Bad Start
Typically Canada would open this tournament against one of the group’s minnows, but it took on a talented U.S. squad instead. Canada lost 4–2. Maybe a couple of bounces went the way of the Americans, but there’s no denying that U.S. goalie Alex Nedeljkovic outplayed Canada’s second-string goalie Mason McDonald. First-choice goalie Mackenzie Blackwood was suspended for the tournament’s first two games.
Canada then whipped Denmark 6–1 and it seemed things were back on track. If Canada beat the Swiss in regulation, they would have still have a chance to top the group after Sweden edged the U.S. 1–0.
But Canada fell behind 2–0 to Switzerland and had to battle for a shootout win. First place in the group went to Sweden and Canada could finish no better than third place after the U.S. cleaned up against Switzerland and Denmark.
