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TSN Director of Scouting

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Each day throughout the World Junior Hockey Championship, TSN Director of Scouting Craig Button brings important issues and topics surrounding the tournament to the forefront.

HBI1: Two smoking gun stats commonly reflect a team’s success or failure at the World Junior Championship: team save percentage and penalty-killing. Neither flatters Canada this year. Team save percentage is a measure of not just goaltending but overall goal prevention and Canada finished the tournament ninth at .860. Only one team was worse through five games: Switzerland (.840). The goalie combination of Mackenzie Blackwood and Mason McDonald wasn’t good enough for Canada to compete, but it would be wrong to focus only on them. As for the PK, Canada killed off a tournament-low 59% of power plays it faced. Not to put too fine a point on it but to be clear, Canada ranked 10th out of 10 teams. That’s not something you see often. And neither is losing in the quarter-finals.

HBI2: The Patrik Laine-Sebastian Aho-Jesse Puljujarvi Line (aka LAP Line) is earning a place among the pantheon of great lines at the WJC. The LAP Line generated 12 of Finland’s 23 goals in Group play and were in on four more in a thrilling 6-5 win over Canada – including the game-deciding goal by Laine. Other high performance lines over the past 30 years include Alexander Mogilny-Sergei Fedorov-Pavel Bure (USSR, 1989), Robert Reichel-Bobby Holik-Jaromir Jagr (Czechoslovakia, 1990), Markus Naslund-Peter Forsberg-Niklas Sundstrom (Sweden, 1993) and Max Domi-Sam Reinhart-Anthony Duclair (Canada, 2015). Worth remembering is one thing that distinguishes the Finnish trio from other great combinations: two of them (Puljujarvi and Laine) are still draft eligible.

HBI3: The history of the WJC has seen three stretches of countries winning at least four years in a row (USSR 1977-1980; Canada 1993-1997 and 2005-09). The chances of that particular piece of hockey history repeating are remote. Heck, countries don’t even win two years in a row any longer. Canada’s loss to Finland means there has not been a single repeat champion over this seven-year period. The winners, in order: Canada, USA, Russia, Sweden, USA, Finland, Canada, TBD. The losers? If anybody, Czech Republic, which was crushed by USA 7-0 in the quarter-finals and hasn’t won a medal since 2005.