“We just didn’t get the bounces to go our way and obviously didn’t get the result we wanted.”
Published Dec 28, 2024 • 5 minute read
With a suddenly nervous and critical country peering over its shoulder, Canada is calmly turning to its bullpen as it steps into must-win territory for its hopes of finishing first in Group A at the world junior hockey championship.
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As for the goal of winning gold, the home team realizes it needs to immediately enter must-be-better mode.
Getting the call to replace the irreplaceable Matthew Schaefer — who suffered what’s being reported as a broken collarbone in Friday’s shocking loss to Latvia — is Sawyer Mynio, a point-per-game blueliner in the Ontario Hockey League also known for his solid defensive play.
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Expected to help rescue an attack that’s having trouble finishing is Carson Rehkopf, a big (6-2, 200-pound) forward who has 72 goals in his last 87 OHL games.
Both Mynio and Rehkopf were innocent bystanders as healthy scratches when Canada, the odds-on favourites to win the tournament when it began, shockingly came up short in a 3-2 final against Latvia that left it in need of a victory over Germany on Sunday.
As expected, Canada dropped into second place on Saturday, when Latvia gave the Americans a battle, but surrendered three consecutive goals in the middle period of a 5-1 loss.
With all teams now having played two games, Group A has the U.S. in front with six points, Canada with four, Finland with three and Latvia with two, while Germany is last with a zero in the column.
On the B side, Czechia and Sweden sit tied for first with six points, while Slovakia has three and Switzerland and Kazakhstan have none.
The Canadian players have been looking in the mirror.
“It was a bit of a (crappy) feeling,” top-line winger Bradly Nadeau said Saturday morning of digesting the loss to a Latvian team it was expected to beat in the same fashion Czechia throttled Kazakhstan (14-2) on Saturday and the U.S. pounded Germany (10-4) on Friday. “We all know what this group is capable of, and losing this game is not our standard. I think we’ll bounce back from it and come even harder.”
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Getting pucks on the net was not a problem as Canada held a 57-26 edge on the shot clock through three periods and the five-minute, 3-on-3 overtime.
Converting the opportunities was — again.
Not including the empty-netter scored by Schaefer to ice the tournament-opening 4-0 victory over Finland, Canada has just five goals on 96 shots through two games.
As good as Linards Feldbergs was in Latvia’s net, too many of the pucks he stopped came from the perimeter and with not enough traffic in front of him.
“We had shots. We also missed on a few,” said Nadeau, who added that, going forward, the Canadians had to be better at “keeping things simple, sticking to our game plan, and just working hard in all situations.
“We needed to score a (few) more goals, that’s obvious,” he added. “But I think that the effort was there. We just didn’t get the bounces to go our way and obviously didn’t get the result we wanted.”
Defenceman Oliver Bonk also noticed the sun came up Saturday, figuratively speaking.
“I don’t feel we played terrible last night,” Bonk said. “We didn’t play our best, but it wasn’t a horrible, terrible game from us. I think we just have to play how we played against Finland. We played a really good game against them. I think we’ve just got to get back to that.”
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Many armchair critics across the land are not interested in such reasoning.
They are oxymorons.
They have a short memory, forgetting the Finland game, and a long memory with the bitter taste of last year’s fifth-place finish in their mouths.
The latter is