Back to the grind

I'm back and yes, I was gone longer than I said I would be. To make it up to you,I'm going to do a trade deadline preview later today with a look at what each team in the league might be doing in the next six days leading up to Saturday's 3pm MST deadline.

Canada goes for a fifth straight World Junior gold tonight against Sweden, 5:30pm MST. I expect offices will empty early on the prairies and the bars will be full.

Call me weak of faith but I do not have the kind of confidence in the Canadian team this year than I did in the last few years. The goaltending this year has not been up to the standards of Mason, Price, Pogge, etc in the last few years, and there have been some shaky links on the defence as well.

Realistically, Canada was lucky to win the semi against the Russians; they did not play that well and you can't count on those miracle goals with seconds remaining to bail you out every night. They also got a very poor start against the USA and went down 3-0 early. They clawed back in that one but again, you can't count on being able to do that every game. So the only two real big tests the team has had, they didn't do that well in. This year's team is just not quite as good as the last few versions, I think, and the Swedes look very, very good. Remember the Swedes beat the Russians 5-0 in the round-robin so if the Russians gave the Canadians problems, then the Swedes are going to be worse.

Oh, and one other World Junior note......I know there's all kinds of political problems in the IIHF with doing this, but they have to find a way to tighten up the competition in the tournament. 10 teams is at least one, maybe two teams too many. Kazakhstan went 0-6 and were outscored 60-4 in the tournament this year.....they do not belong here in any way, shape, or form and if they are the 10th best team in the world then this should be at best a 9 team tournament. They got beat by an average of 9.33 goals every night, and weren't even competitive against the other relegation fodder (7-1 loss to Latvia, 9-0 loss to Germany). It's not fair to those kids on that team or to the kids on the other teams who have to play against them.

If they have to stick with ten teams, then I like the idea floating around of having the two best teams from the previous year's B-pool and the two worst teams from the previous year's A-pool play a qualification tournament in November each year to qualify two teams to that year's A-pool. Under that system, Kazakhstan, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland would meet this coming November to play a quick round-robin tournament, with the top two teams qualifying for next year's WJCs.