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World Juniors 2022
Holiday hockey is back again! Get the ultimate guide on the World Junior Championship, which begins Dec. 26. The defending champion Americans are gunning for gold again, but they'll face stiff competition from the host Canadians. Other medal contenders in Edmonton are Sweden, Russia and Finland.
SCOUTING SWITZERLAND: MOUNTAINS TO CLIMB
THE DRAFT HAS NOT BEEN kind to this cohort of Swiss teens. But perhaps a good showing at the WJC will convince NHL teams to take another look at tournament veterans such as defenseman Noah Meier, center Lorenzo Canonica or winger Ray Fust. Meier has found offensive success this season playing against men back home, while Canonica and Fust are both in North America playing for QMJHL Shawinigan and USHL Sioux Falls. Both have been decent contributors but not go-to guys on their rosters. However, the more likely result is that Switzerland will find itself fighting for relegation in a round-robin group of death where they suddenly look like the fifth-place team behind an exciting young Slovakian squad. Still, Switzerland isn’t entirely bereft of NHL prospects, with Simon Knak (NSH) leading the…
WORLD JUNIOR CHAMPIONSHIP PREVIEW
THE WORLD JUNIORS ARE back in Alberta, and assuming all goes according to plan, this time there will be fans in the building. The pandemic made last year’s tournament a bubble affair in Edmonton, and protocols surrounding the teams will no doubt be tight again, but tickets are nonetheless being sold to hockey-mad partisans in the western Canadian province. Last year’s tournament had a chaotic bent to it because of COVID-19, with Germany being forced to play shorthanded early on while players quarantined and a number of solid candidates on other squads were left at home either because of positive cases or close contacts. With case counts in Europe and North America now on the rise as the weather gets colder and people spend more hours indoors, how healthy a team…
SCOUTING SLOVAKIA: SPOILER ALERT
SLOVAKIA HAS HAD A TOUGH go of it internationally lately, and thanks to the pandemic, the under-18 squad is still stuck in the second rung of competition. But this summer’s Hlinka-Gretzky tournament provided a giant ray of hope, as the under-18s won silver with some dazzling performances before falling to Russia in the final. Two of the most pivotal players on that Hlinka-Gretzky team were power forward Juraj Slafkovsky and two-way defenseman Simon Nemec, both of whom are potential top-10 picks in the 2022 draft and veterans of last year’s world juniors. Nemec was the captain of the Hlinka-Gretzky squad and the eventual tournament MVP, while Slafkovsky finished second in team scoring to 16-year-old wunderkind Dalibor Dvorsky (who has kept himself on the radar by dominating Sweden’s junior ranks this season). >THN’S…
THE TIME TO MAKE MEMORIES
IF WE ASSIGN SIGNIFICANCE to morsels of hockey history by their sheer volume of “Where were you when…” memories, the international game laps the pro game. How many sometimes literal postage-stamp moments has the sport gifted us over the decades when nations clash? These names are etched immortally in hockey lore: Paul Henderson at the 1972 Summit Series; Mike Eruzione at the 1980 Miracle On Ice, Wayne Gretzky to Mario Lemieux at the 1987 Canada Cup, Peter Forsberg’s one-hander in 1994, “JooOOOOe…Sakic” in 2002, Sidney Crosby’s golden goal in 2010, Jocelyne Lamoureux’s spectacular shootout goal in 2018. Under that international umbrella, the World Junior Championship owns its own corner of where-were-you-whens: the 1987 Punch-Up in Piestany, John Slaney’s winner in 1991, the Marc-Andre Fleury own-goal in 2004, Jonathan Toews’ shootout heroics…
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