2013-14 NHL Season

I am sure this will be the end of Sutter's "take 25 guys and two goalies to camp" idea. Maybe Domi and Nurse - among others - make the team if they run the camp the way they used to.

 

I won't be setting the alarm for the Canada/Russia Bronze Medal game.

 

I'll be getting up just in time to see the inevitable end of game brawl.

 

Too bad Bert Templeton isn't coaching this team.

 

I knew there was someone I was forgetting. Even without Ryan with Kessel Kane and Parise they should score. They'll be good. It's a little frustrating because they could be better.

 

Or Bill LaForge.

 

No kidding. They left the top two scorers in the OHL at home. One of them, Dane Fox, scored four goals tonight and now has 46 in only 40 games. But, no, a guy like that can't play for Team Canada.

 

No roles for guys like that, we must have a checking line. Fucking ridiculous. Darnell Nurse was too risky? Could have used some of that risk today.

 

Dane Fox is an overage, therefore not eligible to play.

 

Yeah, I realized that after. I forgot that Fox was an overager.

No excuse for passing over Connor Brown, though. And, speaking of Erie, will Connor McDavid be able to shrug this off quickly once he returns to the Otters? I doubt he's ever been this overwhelmed before, and it'll be interesting to watch how he responds.

 

Interesting thought on McDavid, who looked way over his head on many occasions. Kid is a mega-talent but that spot might have been better used on an older player.

As for the hysteria on Twitter, Facebook and other venues about the junior team's fourth-place finish, many of the people doing the pontificating about the state of junior hockey in Canada - including plenty of media types - don't watch any junior hockey except for the WJC.

Interesting quote by Sutter, anybody who is involved in AAA minor hockey or knows people who are knows he is spot on with this assessment:

"Development starts at 10 years of age," said Sutter. "It’s not about Xs and Os and those types of things – it’s with skills and skating. You see how these teams in Europe, how they’ve done a remarkable job with that.

"It’s something in our country we have to evaluate. There’s too much focus on winning and losing at a young age and not enough about the skill part of it and the skating part of it. That’s truly how it starts."

 

With all due respect, Double J, apart from his 2013-2014 stats, what do you know about Connor Brown? I get that he plays in Owen Sound's division so maybe you've seen him play a few times, but still - there are lots of possible reasons he got passed over. Just like there were lots of possible reasons when he was passed over 155 times in the 2012 NHL draft.

Maybe Hockey Canada scouts, who have likely seen him play quite often (given that he's in Erie with McDavid and Strome) and who are generally pretty excellent at their jobs, see that he can't skate. Or that he's a cherry picker. Or that he mainly gets his points because he's playing with Fox (who wouldn't be at the tournament) or McDavid (who they knew wouldn't play much). Or maybe he's not the type of kid who can learn a system in a short period of time.

I don't know which of these are true, but they're all very possible. Apologies for the rant, but this kind of second-guessing is extremely easy to do. Picking the team with the best chance to win a world championship is extremely hard to do.