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Vancouver Canucks: Virtanen, McCann, Boeser at World Jr. Development Camps
August 2, 2015, 2:52 PM ET [87 Comments]
Carol Schram
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On both sides of the border, hockey's best prospects have gathered for their summer development camps with an eye towards choosing the lineups for next year's World Junior Championship in Helsinki, Finland.

The Canadian players are currently gathering in Calgary, with the first games scheduled to run on Monday.

Meanwhile, this year's first-round pick for the Canucks, Brock Boeser, is on the ice in Lake Placid, New York, with Team USA.

Click here for all the details on the U.S. National Junior Evaluation Camp, which runs right through until August 8.

For Sunday's game against Finland, Boeser's playing right wing on the first line of Team White, matched up with two highly-touted linemates: 2014 first-rounder Sonny Milano of the Columbus Blue Jackets and Detroit's 2014 first-rounder Dylan Larkin. Boeser was listed on the fourth line for his team's first game on Saturday—a 4-3 loss to the other American group, Team Blue.

Finland and Sweden are joining the Americans in Lake Placid, while the Czechs and Russians will be in Calgary with the Canadians.

Here's the main Twitter account for the the U.S. camp:




They're using a separate account to tweet out the scoring during the scrimmage. Boeser's linemate Sonny Milano does have a goal today against Finland:




Meanwhile in Calgary, Hockey Canada is running concurrent camps for its Under-17, Under-18 and Under-20 programs, bringing together 194 of the country's best prospects for nine days of training and evaluation.




The U20s rolled into Calgary on Saturday and are practicing today ahead of their inaugural Summer Showcase game against Russia tomorrow night at 7 p.m. PT, which will be televised on TSN.

Like the Americans, Canada has split their 40 World Junior hopefuls into two groups.

Vancouver's Jared McCann will center the third line for the group that's set to face Russia on Monday:




The camp is being overseen by head coach Dave Lowry of the Victoria Royals—a sixth-round draft pick of the Canucks in 1983 who spent the first three years of his 20-year, 1,084 NHL-game career in Vancouver.




Jake Virtanen is in Canada's second group, listed at right wing on the second line with Boston's 2015 first-rounder Jake DeBrusk and Colorado's 2014 first-rounder Connor Bleackley.




After a near-perfect gold-medal performance at the 2014 World Juniors on home soil in Montreal and Toronto, the pressure will be on the Canadians to defend their title this Christmas in Finland.

To wrap up today, it doesn't look like Nick Bonino is letting last week's trade to Pittsburgh cramp his summer style!


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