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Hockey Canada hopeful less is more at under-17 level
A few years back, future top NHL draft prospects Nathan MacKinnon and Seth Jones played at the world under-17 challenge. It was not much of a portent for the season-long debate of their merits leading up to the 2013 NHL draft. The then 16-year-old Jones' Team USA skated to an easy 12-1 win over a 15-year-old MacKinnon and Team Atlantic.
Hopefully, that illustrates what Hockey Canada overhauled the under-17 component of its program of excellence last spring. If one did a retcon of that 2011 tournament, that mismatch involving Jones and MacKinnon would not only have not occurred, but the latter would not have been playing since he was a from a region that often had to dip into the minor hockey ranks to fill out its roster.
Problems often begin at the roots. The long-time model for the U17 involved Canada sending five regional squads, but the rest of the world's improvement has made that obsolete. Maybe the counter move is a little belated — Team Ontario finishing sixth in 2013 was a tipoff something was awry — but better late than never. Canada is icing just three teams chosen at large (Red, Black, and White) for the November U17 in Sarnia, Ont.
From Ken Campbell (@THNKenCampbell):
Instead of having five regional teams, Hockey Canada instead had a camp this past summer with the 108 best 16-year-olds, regardless of geography. From that, three rosters of 22 players each will be chosen for the Under-17 World Hockey Challenge, so French speaking players from Quebec will be playing with Anglophones from British Columbia, Maritimers with players from Ontario. That way, as [Hockey Canada’s senior director of hockey operations Scott] Salmond pointed out, the third-best goaltender in Ontario might get a chance to play in the tournament, “because he might also be the third-best goalie in all of Canada. We needed to get this quota system out of it and have the absolute best players together more often.”
... This, of course, has raised the dander of those who think Hockey Canada is further catering to only elite players. By decreasing the player pool at the under-17 level by 44 players and possibly eliminating the chance for unknown players from small towns to be exposed to a high level of competition, is Hockey Canada guilty of identify and catering to only the best of the best at too young an age? Salmond says Hockey Canada’s tracking over the last decade indicates that the best players in any age group tend to move on to the elite teams anyway. (The Hockey News)
The big takeaway, in a country with so much language politics, is probably the emphasis on mixing up players from across the country. Hockey Canada has often come under scrutiny for how many players from the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League are taken on the national junior team. That's a valid question, but at the Memorial Cup in May, Val-d'Or coach Mario Durocher (who guided Canada at the 2004 world junior championship) said young players often separate themselves into social groups, with a resulting carryover on to the ice. The quote was a gem.
We do the under-17 and the Quebecers are proud to wear the blue jersey, and things, and when you go to Team Canada [tryouts], everyone forgets. You play for your country. And this is where we get that mentality of guys coming to training camp and they stick together instead of mixing with all the guys. That’s why it’s so hard for our French guys to mix it up sometime. When I send some guys, that’s the first thing I tell them, ‘go and mix with the western guy, the Ontario guy, the Maritime guy. The coach will like that.’ The coach doesn't like to see all the French guys sitting at one table together. And then they come back, ‘uh, they don’t like French guys.’ That’s bull----. When you’re coaching Team Canada, you don’t care about the language, you care about the best players. That’s the mentality that has to change."
That's obviously a two-way street. (Plymouth Whalers rookie Will Bitten, a Franco-Ontarian, said last month he relished helping translate for his teammates at the U17 camp.)
That is just one part of the puzzle. There is more strength in numbers with scaling back to three teams. Moving the touirnament ahead to Nov. 2-8 also recognizes the physical and mental strain a major junior schedule puts on a 16-year-old. A lot of players chosen for the U17 are already playing heavy minutes in the OHL, WHL and QMJHL, which tends to catch up to them by the midpoint of the regular season. The tournament's timing allows them to play while still near peak form and have the week to 10 days off at Christmas that other players receive. So there's a win-win in terms of sending out stronger teams and putting players first.
— Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.
