Rumors are coming today but first....
Yesterday saw some truly ridiculous outcomes at the WJC...
Stacked Canada, sporting an unreal TWENTY first-round picks, took apart Germany 16-2, while later in the night the Americans defeated Austria 11-0.
Germany and Austria are two very proud hockey countries who worked hard to send their kids to a quarantine thousands of mile’s away over Christmas...fighting COVID and more these countries were embarrassed and humiliated by Canadian and American kids, who you can be sure didn’t want to have anything to do with this kind of display.
Instead of representing themselves as the fine, soon-to-be professionals they are destined to become, these strong-of-character kids were asked to run up the score due to ridiculous IIHF rules that use INFINITE goal differential as one of their determining factors in rankings.
As a youth sports coach for over a decade now I have been in these situations. On both sides. When your team is obviously mismatched against an opponent, here are numerous ways to keep from embarrassing a team whose only fault is they are in the position of playing at the wrong level. All these great players have been there for sure. They know how to play it out without embarrassing their opponents.
This tournament has been a long-standing holiday tradition in Canada for decades and over the past several years, thanks to the NHL Network, Americans are also getting into it. It has to hold itself to higher standards than we were shown yesterday or become a second class tournament that we don’t put on national TV for our kids to watch and learn about terrible sportsmanship each Christmas season..