North America's kids trying the impossible at World Cup of Hockey

This group with North America on its shirts, a made-up concoction that’s equal parts youthful branding exercise and hockey team, is the closest thing this World Cup of Hockey has to a true wild-card.

Pretty much everyone else, including the home-country favourites and even the patchwork that’s wearing the uniform of battered and beleaguered Europe, are known quantities. Then along come these punks, each of them according to the tournament format 23 years old and under, most of them oozing puck-carrying skills and skating like the wind, all of them apparently fearing nothing, and it’s an intriguing experiment. At least until they go splat all over the Air Canada Centre ice.

Because they will. An inevitable rule that plays out over and over again in any team game concerns finding the right mix of youth and experience. It’s been left up to Todd McLellan to assemble something resembling coherence out of the unformed potential he’s been dealt as head coach of the North Americans, and the challenges beyond just sorting out the lines and pairings run to the elemental.

“One is just who are the alphas and who’s going to be the followers,” said McLellan on Thursday. “They’re just figuring out that, and doing a pretty good job of it.

“Another is mindset. We’re a fast, exciting team going one way - and we can be pretty exciting going the other way too.”

The obvious contrast here is Canada, and for example, the pairing of forwards Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry. The longtime Anaheim teammates were together the past two Olympics on a line with Brenden Morrow in 2010 in Vancouver, and then with Jamie Benn two years ago in Sochi when they formed one of the most effective forechecking and possession lines of the entire tournament.

Perry wasn’t included among Canada’s original roster named last spring, but with Jeff Carter out he was called back into the squad a couple of weeks ago. This time, the plug-and-play winger alongside is John Tavares, who off two exhibitions in the role has made himself right at home. The sum is not so much flashy pyrotechnics but the sort of little details that glue together results, like Perry and Getzlaf providing a red-walled screen on Tavares’ tying goal against Russia, or Getzlaf scoring the winner in overtime when he got ahead of a sloppy Russian line change.

“Getz and I have played so many games together, there’s really no transition involved with us,” says Perry. “It’s been a revolving door on the left wing, and Johnny’s a skilled young player who can go out and dominate.”

That’s the real mountain that faces the Canadian and American kids. It’s not about the hockey code that practically demands standing up and answering back to the physical likes of Roman Polak, whose Tuesday night shove of Connor McDavid enlivened that rehearsal. It has everything to do with matching up against the grinding, shift-to-shift efficiency of old hands like Getzlaf and Perry.

Finally, it points to the essential contradiction of McLellan’s position.

“We’re trying to give them enough structure to play the game freely,” he says -- an impossible dream but then again, far more watchable than any other alternative.