Canadians love their hockey, as the stereotype goes. The “Canucks” have just wrapped up their fifth straight gold medal—in a 5–1 win over the Swedes on Monday—in the 10-country tournament.
While Canadians will find little wrong with the tournament—on top of Monday’s win, Canada has taken gold 14 other times and has been on the podium an additional 10 times—there could be some changes introduced to level the playing field a bit.
In its current format, the top 10 ranked hockey countries in the world are all given invites but even then, there seems to be a divide between the good and the great.
Kazakhstan was among the privileged few to partake but when all was said and done it finished with no wins and four losses, scoring two goals and allowing 46, including a 15–0 thrashing at the hands of Canada.
The Sports Network (TSN) hockey analyst Bob McKenzie compared the Kazakhstan–Canada game to the New York Yankees playing in the Little League World Series. He suggested scaling back to an eight-team tournament format.
“There simply aren’t 10 good nations when it comes to international junior hockey,” he explained in his TSN blog.
In fact, the Kazakhs weren’t the only country to go winless; the Latvians also lost all four games while only doing marginally better on the scoreboard, scoring five goals and allowing 26.
Competition would definitely be ratcheted up without two sub-par, winless teams for the top teams to beat up on.
U.S. Falters
The Stars and Stripes had a very good round-robin portion of the tournament earning three regulation time wins but the one regulation loss came in a 7–4 decision to Canada on New Year’s Eve, where the team blew a three-goal lead.
While the U.S. team did make the playoff round, it ended up losing 5–3 to the surprising Slovaks in a game where the Americans fell behind 3–1.
“We didn’t finish early, and that certainly came back to haunt us,” lamented U.S. bench boss Ron Rolston to the Toronto Star after the Slovakia loss.
The U.S. winded up fifth out of 10 teams after defeating the Czech Republic 3–2 in OT—finishing up well below expectations.
While the U.S. upset Canada and grabbed gold back in 2004, the only other time it has medaled in the last six years was in 2007 with a bronze. The U.S. grabbed silver in 1997 and two more bronzes in 1992 and 1986.
Like the Canadians, the U.S.’s roster is filled with players from the major junior hockey ranks as well as U.S. college ranks and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be making more trips to the podium.
“[U.S. hockey] is an organization that should be doing better based on the talent that it has,” McKenzie said after the loss to Slovakia.
“This team, if you put it on paper, they stack up very well to Canada, very well to Sweden, and very well to Russia, there’s no reason why this team shouldn’t be competing for a medal.”
“They have to start assessing why.”
No better time to start re-evaluating than when many others are making New Year’s resolutions.