I wrote this after Canada’s shootout loss to Latvia but before their 3-0 win against Germany. It still applies:
When Hockey Canada made their final cuts from selection camp and management group lead Peter Anholt met with the media at the team’s hotel in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, he spoke about how much more prepared this team was than the disappointing one that went out with a whimper in the quarterfinals a year ago. They named their coaching staff earlier, he said. They participated in the World Junior Summer Showcase this year after not having any World Juniors programming the previous summer, he said. “I really know this player,” he kept saying when asked about his guys. He talked about having been with this group all the way back to the Hlinka Gretzky Cup, and all of the guys from that team that were on this one. They’d brought back a Stanley Cup-winning head scout of almost 40 years in Al Murray, who’d twice been their chief evaluator for gold medal-winning teams.
A year ago, then-head coach Alan Letang talked after almost every game about his team’s struggles getting to the net and finishing plays in the dirty areas around the crease. On Friday night, it was the same story. Only in the lead-up to this year’s tournament, staff publicly hinted at their disappointment in last year’s team. Scott Walker, a member of the management group, flew to meet with returnees Tanner Molendyk and Brayden Yager to tell them they needed to set a higher standard for this group. That Team Canada beat Latvia 10-0. This year, Hockey Canada set out to construct a more competitive roster. And the roster they’ve built, with 11 first-rounders, couldn’t put Latvia — with its two drafted prospects — away. They never really even came close. Before their 0-for-8 run in the shootout, they put the game in Latvia’s hands with 42.4 seconds left in overtime, after an inexcusable bench minor for too many men. Their 56 shots on goal don’t even tell the story, because you can count on one hand the number of them that were truly threatening.
It sure doesn’t feel like they know their guys, either, and that has been most evident on their dreadful, disjointed, 1-for-7 power play. The scrappy but small Tanner Howe didn’t look like a fit at the net-front early. Oliver Bonk, who hasn’t run his own junior club’s power play the last couple of years, didn’t look like a fit at the top of the umbrella. Sam Dickinson, who runs that unit and leads all power-play quarterbacks in the OHL with nine power-play goals and 19 power-play points through 26 games this season, wasn’t even given a look on one of their units Friday after they’d gone 0-for-6 to start the tournament and their top power-play guy, Matthew Schaefer, left the game and didn’t return (a story which would have been the story of the day on any other day). Bradly Nadeau, who has gone downhill on the flank prolifically for every team he has ever played for, is positioned in the bumper looking for tips and redirects. Carson Rehkopf, the team’s biggest shot threat, who has 72 goals in his last 87 OHL games and led the OHL in power-play goals last year, has yet to be registered for the tournament after filling the net in selection camp.
Forget all the talk about the players they left off — and the talent and power-play proficiency of guys like Zayne Parekh, Beckett Sennecke and Andrew Cristall — this is the team they chose and there should be no excuses for how it looked on Friday.
The heat deserves to be turned all the way up and it starts at the top.
GO FURTHER
Team Canada upset by Latvia in shambolic performance and more from Day 2 at 2025 World Juniors
