The most wonderful time of the year for a lot of hockey fans, especially in Canada, has arrived. For whatever reason, and other countries can't quite comprehend at the same level, the breath of a hockey nation is held for a two week period between Boxing Day and January 5th and the fate of a group of teenagers is why.
The World Junior Hockey Championships begin today in Buffalo, and the Canadian squad will be looking to return to the top rung, a spot they haven't occupied since Curtis Lazar, Connor McDavid and company did so three years ago.
Canada lost the gold medal game in a shootout last year, a heartbreaking end to the tournament in Montreal. Seven players are returning to try to get the gold medal back, while the Americans will look to hold onto it, and eight other nations will try to knock them off. Realistically, this is a 5 team tournament, with Canada, the U.S., Finland, Sweden and Russia holding hopes for the win, while the rest are looking for placing and a couple will hope to avoid relegation.
The tournament takes a bit of a twist this time around, because the two pools have been altered because of the Canada-US outdoor game on Friday, meaning the first and second place finishers from last year are in the same pool. That has created sort of a "Group of Death", with Finland expected to rebound from last year's 9th place finish with a group of top end defensemen.
The Finns provide the competition for Team Canada today, and there will be some Senators content on both sides.
Two of Ottawa's 2017 draft picks have made the team, London Knights Alex Formenton and Cape Breton's Drake Batherson. Markus Nurmi, a 6th round pick in 2016 has made the Finnish team. Finally, 2016 first rounder Logan Brown makes his long-awaited World Juniors debut this year as he is expected to center the USA's top line. Brown was a late cut in 2016 and missed the tournament with an injury last season.
Given the Senators' current place in the standings, many eyes will also be on the future, and the potential top 5 in the 2018 entry draft will be playing, so there will likely be a lot of eyes on those players as well. Those players include Swedish defenseman Rasmus Dahlin, a couple of Americans in forward Brady Tkachuk and defenseman Quinn Hughes, Russian winger Andrei Svechnikov and Czech winger Filip Zadina.
But while we watch in anticipation of the Senators' future, it is still a tournament where we cheer for our country. Canada made some questionable roster decisions (cutting early 2017 first round picks Nick Suzuki and Cody Glass for example), including cutting a couple of top 10 picks, instead going for a team that, if you saw the two pre-tournament tune-up games, fore-checks in waves and plays with relentless abandon. It worked well in the tune-ups and they ran up the score a couple of times, but it will be fun to see if they can do that against the other elite teams, starting this afternoon.
There is one standout player on the Canadian roster, but they can all skate, and there is a lot of goal-scoring potential. The defense is mobile, not afraid to join the rush and returning goalie Cater Hart is having a ridiculous season stats-wise in the WHL and will be looking to turn last year's silver into 2018 Gold.
I don't expect the contribution from Senators prospects to be as large as last year, but Thomas Chabot's all-world performance and Colin White's contribution to the American Gold Medal victory have the bar set pretty high.
It is really my favourite time of the hockey year, and even moreso now given the slide the Senators are on, and the style that Team Canada intends to play should provide for some utterly entertaining hockey, which would be a refreshing change to what Senators fans have grown accustomed to of late.