the world of jim

Two games today.

The first, Latvia vs. the US. Not surprisingly, another routing of the Latvians. Again, the crowd for some strange reason was solidly behind the Latvians. Go figure. They scored one goal and the crowd went nuts. Too bad they just don’t seem to have enough skill or drive to do better. They don’t take enough shots when they should and while their goaltending isn’t terrible, they aren’t a hard checking team and so they let their opposition walk in and control the play too, too much.

Game 2 of the day. Canada vs. Slovakia. The mood of the rink is electric. The Slovaks are good so we have the sense it will be a good game and perhaps our first test. The shots on net for the first time are even throughout the game. Team Canada put the other goalie in net for the first time so I was a bit concerned but he played extremely well. It was a very physical game with both teams giving and taking. Fortuntately, nothing nasty and while the refs certainly seemed to favor the Slovaks, we have a great penalty kill and our power play is simply outstanding. I would say that we’ve only ever seen our boys not score two or three times with we’ve had a one man advantage. Other teams would be smart if they were never a man down.

So despite the score, it was a great solid game and some of the shots (and goals) we saw were simply outrageous. The passing is tremendous but sometimes all it takes is to get the puck to the net. The boys don’t hesitate to shoot if there’s no pass despite and obvious effort to do lots of passing. That’s one thing Team Canada might not get away with so much with the Americans. Sooner or later other teams with figure out the Canadian way and the games will certainly get tougher and tougher. Certainly the Slovaks have been the best so far at reading our plays and stopping them – but at the end of the night – simply not good enough.

This entry was posted on December 30, 2009 at 6:38 pm and is filed under World Junior's 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.