Yahoo Sports 2025 World Junior Championship: Canada Controls Its Destiny Against United States
2024 has saved its best hockey for last.
The Canada-United States New Year's Eve matchup is always my favourite hockey game of the year. What could be better than the world's two premier hockey nations duking it out for bragging rights to cap off the year?
What about the top seed in their pool hanging in the balance?
There are a lot of playoff scenarios in play for Pool A today, but one thing is for sure: the winner of Canada-USA will win the pool and go on to face Switzerland in the quarterfinals. That means that despite both teams' messy round-robins thus far, they are both firmly in control of their own destinies heading into tonight's final matchup.
The United States has had one of the most chaotic teams in the tournament, riding its juggernaut offence to a 2-0-1-0 record despite a weak blueline and poor performance from the presumptive best goalie in the tournament, Trey Augustine. They could've wrapped up the pool two days ago with a win over Finland, but their overtime loss opened the door for Canada to come storming back.
For all of the well-deserved consternation over Canada's inert offence and shocking shootout loss to Latvia, they head into New Year's Eve with the same record as the Americans.
True, they appear pathologically unable to score -- it took a truly bizarre bounce for them to even score two goals against the last-place Germans -- but they more than make up for it at the other end of the ice. They've allowed just two goals (not including the shootout) all tournament, with goaltender Carter George posting shutouts in both of his starts.
George will man the net again tonight, facing the daunting task of shutting down the Americans' three-headed monster of Gabe Perreault, James Hagens, and Ryan Leonard. The United States will counter with Augustine, who gets the start over Hampton Slukynsky despite his underwhelming stats through two starts (.879 save percentage).
Since it's obviously unreasonable to expect George to put up a third consecutive shutout, Canada will need its top forwards to show up if they want to beat the U.S. They'll need a lot more out of Brayden Yager, Berkly Catton, and Gavin McKenna in their top six, none of whom have more than one point so far. Captain Yager has been particularly disappointing thus far, with zero points through three games.
Depending on the result of Finland-Latvia today, Canada could end up anywhere from first to third in their pool. It'll be up to them to make everything else irrelevant with a win over their hated rivals in the most anticipated game of the tournament.
The game gets underway at 6:00 tonight, on TSN.
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