TORONTO – To the World Junior Championship fans that have come to Toronto this week expecting to see the Canadian team tested in the quarterfinal, semifinal and gold-medal game, my deepest sympathies.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for action before the final, you might consider taking in Monday morning rush-hour traffic at the Yonge-Bloor subway station.
It feels something closer to a simulation of the IIHF under-20s rather than the real thing.
If you pore over the scrolls from tournaments past you’ll see that the semifinal has been a nail-biter or heart-breaker as often as the final. No such luck this year.
“The Canadians better watch that they don’t come out flat against the Slovaks,” one NHL scout said during the second intermission of the home team’s rout of Denmark. Pause. No keeping a straight face.
It would be impossible to get a more favourable draw in the money round than the one the gifted Canadian team has. The road to gold going through Denmark and Slovakia; seriously, for one tournament anyway, Canadian fans know what it’s like to be trust-fund babies, to be born on third base and imagine they’ve hit a triple.
It’s something like the 2002 Olympics where the Canadian men had a semifinal against giant-killer Belarus. The Belarussians had ripped out Tommy Salo’s heart in the quarterfinal at the Salt Lake City Games, but that’s how giant-killers roll — you beat one Leviathan only to lay down and know your place when Goliath steps up.
How this team looks entering the final is anyone’s guess — go ahead, you can safely look past Slovakia which folded its tents in a 8-0 loss in the teams’ opening game in Montreal. There were some things to like in Canada’s, some things to cause concern and some things that remain a mystery.
Things to like:
1) Connor McDavid seems to be getting his game together. He wheeled and dealed on the opening goal by Curtis Lazar midway through the first period. He broke the game wide open at 4-0 with a display that was the phenom in his usual way — a dazzling deke that looked fast even in slow motion. He was full value as player of the game. (For those tracking such things, scouting takes on Jack Eichel’s performance in the American loss to Russia in Montreal were overwhelmingly unflattering.)
2) The play by the blue line as an ensemble was impeccable, allowing only 14 shots to get through to the Canadian goal. And the only real scoring chance of any gravity came in the opening minutes when the speedy Nikolaj Ehlers, as gifted a scorer as you’ll find anywhere, somehow slipped behind Darnell Nurse and Shea Theodore for a clean break on goal. Zach Fucale turned aside the shot and really had nothing much to do except slap his stick on the ice when power plays were expiring.
3) Lawson Crouse looks full value for his place on this team. As a draft-eligible player it might have seemed that he was going to be ticketed for 13th forward duty. Not even close. Yeah, he’s on a grinding, bumping fourth line, but he showed first-line skill when he neatly toe-dragged and fired home the 3-0 goal. He could be a key player when Canada heads to Finland for next year’s tournament.
Causes for concern:
1) Robby Fabbri was helped off on his first shift after taking a big hit (I tempted fate in a missive from Montreal when I talked about NHL scouts’ fear of Fabbri getting injured). This caused some impromptu shuffling of lines, with Jake Virtanen moving into Fabbri’s spot on the third line, beside Nic Petan and Nick Paul; in turn, Brayden Point moved up on McDavid’s left side.
All that seemed to work out, but then again, it’s Denmark. Maybe more of a concern will be the loss of Fabbri to the power play. Fabbri had been effective back on the point for this team. There’s no shortage of candidates, but who fills it in the gold-medal game we might not know even after the semifinal.
2) This was probably the least impressive performance by Canada’s top line of Max Domi, Sam Reinhart and Anthony Duclair. I’m picking a nit here — they weren’t bad, but they didn’t shine as brightly as they had earlier in the tournament.
Reinhart had a goal and might have had a hat trick but for a couple of sensational early saves by the besieged Danish netminder Georg Sorenson.
Domi, Reinhart and Duclair were better in tense games against the Finns and the Americans — against the Swedes or Russia we’ll get a better read on them.
3) The five-on-three power play can use some work.
Continued mysteries:
1) As he did against Slovakia, goaltender Zach Fucale was untested. He was very good in the one tense start, the win over the Finns. It has said here throughout that he should be No. 1, but do you even need him against the Slovaks?
2) Who emerges from the competitive semifinal between Sweden and Russia, two teams that Canada hasn’t faced since real combat started? My memories of the Russians in Buffalo in 2010 are too fresh. I’ve also blown the dust off memories of Russian teams in Pardubice in ’02 and Winnipeg in ’99.
The Russians gave Canada a heck of a time in the exhibition round, beating the home team 2-1 thanks to some stone-clad netminding by Ilya Sorokin, who stopped 50 of 51 shots. Friday it was another Russian goaltender Igor Shestyorkin, who turned aside 39 of 41 U.S. shots.
Almost any other year you get to the semis and form can go sideways if there’s a hot goaltender or a very cold one. Same thing applies here, except you have to wait until the final.
