It's quite the Cananadrum!

There are well-adjusted Canadian fans who grasp why the juniors no longer dominate, and are here just to watch good hockey. I promise not to dunk on Dave Cameron.

Mike Moffat in 1982; if you know, you know. Graphic made with LunaPic.

It’s all good if you rooted, in whole or in part, for Team Canada to have their Appalachian State moment against Latvia in the world junior.

It was good priming for being cashiered by Czechia 4-3 in the quarterfinal on Thursday. So there is that. But this is more about why, as a Canadian, one does not feel low about it.

Being clear-eyed and full-hearted as a sportsfan means you have a team, while also giving yourself the grace to accept and understand that someone else earns their wins. Call it the subtle art of not giving a flick of the opposing goalie’s dropped stick. This is called radical honesty, eh?

Truly enjoying the IIHF World Junior Championship (WJC) as a Canadian involves some emotional edgework. It is a short tournament, they say. A group of healthy-ego-and-then-some hockey people, the adults in the coach’s room, and the teenage players must buy in to go for gold.

Or, well, you just saw it. This downward spiral explains hubris better than any lesson in the Alberta school curriculum. It was on the TV, and all over the internet. Better not bury the lede: it is the first time Canada has lost in the quarterfinals of successive world junior championships in the 44-year Program of Excellence history. And both times, the margin was an own-goal by a London Knights defenceman — Sam Dickinson in the first period on Thursday, Oliver Bonk a year ago.

I swear this is not a dunk on coach Dave Cameron after this outbreak of squeezethestickitis and bad penalties. It surely will not be an exoneration, either.

If there is any positive to come, this should inspire Hockey Canada to pass a Dave Cameron Rule. No more head coaches from the Canadian Hockey League can helm the WJC squad unless their CV includes two or three title-winning teams in the CHL’s Ontario, Québec-Maritimes, and/or Western sub-leagues.

Cast the net wider, and higher. Engage a between-gigs NHL coach à la the late great Pat Quinn in 2009. Free Bruce Boudreau from having to do television! Borrow an AHL coach or NHL assistant with a CHL background for six weeks. Or take a shot with a seasoned Canadian university hockey coach who knows how to build chemistry and itches to work with a roster boasting 11 or more NHL first-round choices. That is a perennial hot take.

Just a thought. Doing nothing evokes the definition of insanity.

At least coaches from those strati of hockey might be more accountable. Hey, if that sounds passive-aggressive, well, someone else started it.

Preparing a team is the entire job of coaching. And Cameron, while hardly the only one at fault, had a team whose penalty problems and scoring woes were the residue of design — not bad puck luck or the dreaded IIHF officiating. It sounds like Canada did not pick the most scorer-laden team on purpose, and when it went pear-shaped, Cameron just acted like there was no Plan B.

Again, this is not a dunk-on-Dave Cameron contest.

Going by the doomscrolling after the Latvia game, more and more Canadians follow the world junior with Active Critical Distancing. We are cool with Canada getting its comeuppance. It’s a natural reaction and it’s not negative.

Some of that (content warning) is a way of subconsciously and silently dissociating from rot in the Canadian sports system which could be the topic of several more posts. I am as guilty as anyone of compartmentalizing that alleged group sexual assault case that is before the courts. It cooled enthusiasm and led to sponsor cancellations in 2023, then progressed to the shrugged-past stage. It takes some effort to remind oneself that case is not resolved.

Canadians are masters of the shrug-past.

There is also resistance to decades of blind hype and surface-level patriotism that is part of TSN’s pitch for the tournament. The host broadcaster has taken about 20 percent off that in recent years. It has still cued people to demand gold or bust, but that all-or-nothing thinking is no way to live.

But you don’t want to opt-out. Winning is fun. Reflected glory! Canada had won 3-of-4 gold medals prior to these last two dud showings. That does include the shifted-to-summer 2022 tournament, where Cameron was also head coach, but had a deeper player group than is typically available at Christmastime. And that team was inches from a silver medal before winning the gold in overtime.

And if Canada does not win, that means the Americans are more likely to get the gold. Sweden produces elite players, and it might win this time, but it is also 1-for-43 winning gold medals since Canada decided to take the WJC seriously.

The WJC is kind of a big deal

The world junior, WJC, or WJHC, takes place every holiday season from Dec. 26 to Jan. 5.

It is an all-out ratings grab for the BellMedia conglomerate, which is not changing any time soon. There is a captive audience, with multi-generational family gatherings to watch the round-robin games over the holidays. It is a chance to talk hockey without considering, guh, cap hits. Everyone can play InstaScout on the upward mobility of someone who plays for the Moose Jaw Warriors.

Anyway, the crux here is to talk about how to fan good — real good, maybe. Active Critical Distancing starts with how much space you give to being all in on Canada winning, and how much you will enjoy the alternative.

Here you should think of character creation in video games. Really. Being a fan of pro-format puck requires having a sense of humour. The CHL is played by very talented young adults, but they are not pros in full. They are prone to letting the last play affect their next play. It makes for better following fodder than the NHL, where the top-flight players are more apt to stay even-keeled.

I am not a gamer. The metaphor involves a slider. You have 100 points, widgets, whatever, to divvy between the HOCKEY part and the HIGH-LARITY baskets.

You should probably not put more than 80 points, or widgets, in either basket. Putting all 100 on HOCKEY puts you in full-on Captain Canada mode, the jersey, the face paint. You even wore an old set of hockey gloves to the arena, with fingers cut out so you can provide a running commentary to your followers through your iPhone. Now that is commitment.

Giving all 100 to HIGH-LARITY is actively rooting for Canada to lose. Please do not do that. What did all these hockeybros from Vaughan, Oakville, and Saint-Constant ever do to you? Hatin’ is not healthful. It is also predictably cynical, and Billy Bragg gently advised against that.

At the same time, though, you are not on the team! Hey, you are just like 2024 top-10 NHL draft choices Bennett Sennecke, Tij Iginla, Zayne Parekh, and Carter Yakemchuk, as well as the co-scoring leaders and No. 1 goal scorer in the OHL!

It is a free country, for the time being. No one should stink-eye you for ordering a Giggle-Lyft when Team Canada founders and fails to generate 5-on-5 offensive activity on the regular.

Odd how that goes. Canada’s hockey ops shied away from high-end 17- and 18-year-olds. Then they dropped points against Latvia, who had six underage players.¹ Well, that’s irony.

Point being, one has to craft their own critical lens. Until Canada gets through the quarterfinals of the tournament, you should be poised to walk away in 30 seconds.

Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.

Media cues that it’s not working are subtle or in your second language. If you read French passably, you could find headlines such as “Dave Cameron est perdu à la tête d’Équipe Canada Junior” that pointed out the coach was out of his depth, or wondered about cancelled practices.

Otherwise, TSN sets the narrative. When offensive output and goals are wanting, you can hear it. The TSN intermission panel of host James Duthie and analysts Cheryl Pounder and Bob McKenzie might say all the right upbeat but measured things. But something in their tones conjures cards being kept close to their chests.

Their job is to maintain hope for the best. The metrics do not lie: the ratings are better when Canada is in the semifinals on Jan. 4 and the gold medal game on Jan. 5. is still a vast chunk of the audience whose interest only goes so far as whether Canada can win gold.

On the other hand, they all know, and you do too, what winning hockey looks like. They know it must materialize right off the hop in a 10-day, seven-game tournament.

Again, I’m not here for media criticism or armchair coaching. They have a job to do. I should try that again sometime.

This is about, well, appreciating it when the heavyweight falls. Even at my most patriotic, I was probably 77 HOCKEY vs. 23 HILARITY. It is your home nation. You want them to win. Or, increasingly more to the point, it is all good as long as anyone but the Americans wins the gold medal.

As the years have rolled, I’d say the slider starts at 46.9 supporting Canada and 53.1 resigned that the wheels were improperly fastened.

This is a healthful tack. You are not any lesser as a fan for recognizing other hockey-playing nations are embracing under-20 hockey, and Canada might have some pride in not adjusting. Just never give anything to the arrogant imperialist Americans.

This is a rational, reasonable bit of personal counter-programming against a see-no-evil, win-at-all-costs attitude that is just as prevalent in Canada as anywhere else. The podcaster Steve Boots had a great segment about that the other day which also worked in Canada Soccer’s DroneGate scandal.

It also acknowledges a problem even Hockey Canada’s house ads during the tournament acknowledge: the price of access to youth hockey has killed it off as a vernacular sport. That Pretty Good Rich Kids trendline troubles started when millennials were children in the 1990s, so it is now normalized as it reaches a second and third generation.

The book Selling the Dream: How Hockey Parents and Their Kids Are Paying The Price For Our National Obsession by Ken Campbell and Jim Parcels (Penguin RandomHouse Canada, 2013) is also a good read on the unspoken Canadian hockey crisis. They diagnosed that the hyper-individualized, hella-expensive cottage industry of year-round AAA hockey was skewing the talent pool. As such, Canada pumps out a plethora of forwards and a paucity of defencemen. There is also a yawning lack of goaltenders. The last line of defence involves the greatest expense for families.

Drafting off that, and other deep dives, a national obsession wanes once something is commodified. Oh, the conversation about how to rebuild vernacular sports in Canada is gonna be long and painful. Better to do another shrug-past.

I have no idea about access to hockey in Czechia, Finland, Latvia, Slovakia, and Sweden, whose combined population is about 85 percent of Canada’s. The play of Latvia and 19-year-old goalie Linards Feldbergs is probably the best story of the tournament. A team repping a nation with fewer people than Montréal doubled its all-time win total in the tournament and took Sweden to the buzzer in a quarterfinal.

The upshot of Latvia showing out is it buys the IIHF time to keep Russia and Belarus in the penalty box semi-permanently. But this is about Canada.

There might be a call for a youneverplayedthegamenerd credential check. I can share what I saw from covering three of these short tournaments, the 2011, ’12, and ’15 WJCs that were in North America.

Those experiences at least provided a template for what Canada should aspire to at this tournament. The spirit emanates from the top, the head coach. Getting buy-in from 20-plus players used to superstar treatment, playing time, and permission structures, with their CHL teams cannot be assumed just because there is a Maple Leaf on the front of the jersey.

The coaching formula is the short-term fix. The talent pool is the longer-term one, if we are setting terms.

Let’s take the most recent first. It is a good example.

2015, Montréal-Toronto, gold with Benoît Groulx

Having Connor McDavid makes the buy-in easier for any hockey group. Groulx, with that qualifier out of the way, had the firm but free hand for what seemed like a confident and loose group throughout the entire run.

And, yes, that team was stacked. Off the back end, Darnell Nurse, Shea Theodore, and Josh Morrissey are all top-four D-men on playoff clubs in the NHL. Alongside McDavid, were Sam Reinhart, Brayden Point, Max Domi, Anthony Duclair, Nick Paul, and Robby Fabbri. Curtis Lazar, loaned by the NHL’s Ottawa Senators, was the relentlessly positive, easy-smile veteran. Nic Petan, one of those brilliant juniors whose physical specs set his pro ceiling at the American League or KHL, shared the team scoring lead.

(Now, please track that the 2015 team’s buy-in included cooperation from the Ottawa Senators. It might come up in the final analysis. Or not. It brings up that the current Senators management, refreshingly by hockey standards, questioned why Yakemchuk was not considered. Ticking off the NHL team whose arena is being used hardly seems like a masterstroke.)

Groulx, who guided three Gatineau Olympiques teams to league titles in the 2000s, was just in his element. Regardless of talent level or seasoning, his Gatineau teams were always tough outs in the playoffs. And, by that point, he had been in the AHL and returned to Gatineau.

One aspect of the Québec-Maritimes league (QMJHL), based on outsider observation, is it’s more of a mind-game, psych-fare league between the men behind the benches. The OHL seems more player-driven. The ‘QM’ has more upsets in the playoffs, more groups of coaches and players shutting out the noise and realizing nothing is given.

There was noise in 2015. Canada had been out of the medals for two seasons, and gold-less in five. The medal round was in the nation’s media capital. And, yet, everything seemed in place.

If anything sums up the vibe back in 2015, it was the team’s inside joke about “tic-tac-tao,” based on Groulx’s franglais pronunciation of tic-tac-toe pass. The dollar-store sports psychology explains itself. As Lazar explained, if there was tension, someone could just toss out a tic-tac-tao.

This brought the then 46-year-old Groulx closer to his 17- to 19-year-old players. How much distance should a coach keep from their players? Based on his aforementioned post-game comments after the USA game, Dave Cameron would have you believe there is no limit.

2012, Edmonton-Calgary, bronze with Don Hay

You may remember this WJC for the Canada-Russia semifinal, where Russia escaped with a 6-5 win in the Saddledome. Nail Yakupov gave that “Russia better” interview to remind NHL scouts that he was still just 18 years old.

There were still medal games. Canada got up for the bronze medal game to beat Finland. Sweden defeated Russia 1-0 in overtime on a golden goal by Mika Zibanejad.

Overall, though, the hindsight-is-2025 take is this was a team with an old-school coach, Hay, and a good-on-paper team. It also had defence and goaltending questions only revealed in the pressure cooker of single-elimination competition.

Does this sound familiar?

Don Hay deserves induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, alongside other outside-of-the-NHL coaches such as Brian Kilrea and Clare Drake. His 1990s Kamloops teams won three league titles and as many Memorial Cup titles in four seasons. He guided the legendary 1995 Canadian junior team. And added a fourth Memorial Cup win with the 2007 Vancouver Giants.

However, this was the early 2010s. Hay, I just realized, was two seasons removed from the last time he guided his club team to a playoff series win.² And he remained a WHL head coach through 2018.

On the ice, Hay was definitely of the old school and wanted to play physical, pesky might-makes-right hockey. The scoring attack was built around Mark Stone, who became a captain and a Stanley Cup winner. It was a grinding team. The future NHL top-end forwards, Jonathan Huberdeau and Mark Scheifele, were both 18-year-olds expected to play a year older in what is often termed a 19-year-old tournament. Longtime Montréal Canadiens stalwart Brendan Gallagher was also a go-to guy.

The hockey ops can only play with the cards they were dealt. What about the ones they neglected to keep? Tyler Toffoli, who is nearing 300 career NHL goals, didn’t even get a sniff of the roster even though he was a 50-goal, 100-point scorer for OHL Ottawa. Two seasons later, whatever holes Toffoli had in his game did not bother the Los Angeles Kings when he helped them win the Stanley Cup.

One of the forwards from the OHL who Hay, et al., took was Devante Smith-Pelly, who could lay the body and gas up a hometown crowd. However, Smith-Pelly was injured in the first game, so that went by the wayside. The rules at the time did not allow for roster changes to replace an injured and/or ineffective player.

2011, Buffalo, silver with Dave Cameron

Oh, the memory burn from the gold-medal game result, 5-3 Russia with five unanswered goals in the final period. It was still 3-zip for Canada when Simon Després, a defenceman, carried the puck ahead in transition on an odd-man rush. And he dumped the puck to a corner.

A wise pressbox mate said softly, it is a bit early to be shutting ’er down. Artemi Panarin scored a minute or so later, and Russia scored again off the ensuing faceoff to pare the margin to 3-2. There is often no shifting back to the attack after calling for a defensive shell — ordering in the snow fence, as Harry Neale once called it — and Canada could not recover.

In hindsight, Russia had Panarin, Vladimir Tarasenko, and Evgeni Kuznetsov. The trio of future NHL frontline forwards got hot at the right time — because junior hockey.

In defence of Cameron, a coach in hockey cannot bend a game to his will. At the same time, it is embedded that he had talked about having a team with “four second lines” and winning through negation. It led to wondering whether Cameron wanted to prove some benign point by winning without elite scoring talent, and it did not happen.

And, oddly enough, when Canada got in a firefight in that 2011 tournament, it couldn’t go home-plate shot for home-plate shot. It lost 6-5 against Sweden in a shootout during the round-robin. And it did not try to put Russia into a four-goal hole that might have been the coup de grâce.

Some of that was the available talent. Brayden Schenn was the fulcrum of Canada’s attack in 2011. The only two forwards who went on to produce a 30-goal NHL season were both 18-year-olds.

No good coach ever has an issue with detractors saying they only won due to the talent on hand. They cannot hear that, something something Patrick Roy once said.

Postscript: that loss to Russia was part of a Cameron runner-up trifecta in 2011. Silver at the WJC. And his Mississauga-St. Michael’s team lost both the OHL final, in Game 7 overtime, and the 2011 Memorial Cup tournament on home ice.

Després was a major back-end cog on the Gerard Gallant-coached Saint John Sea Dogs who beat Mississauga. Gallant had got his team past Groulx in their league final, after Groulx got his group past Roy in the semifinal.³

Summary of wintry experiences

Perhaps this is rambly, scramble, and a bit of a hope play. Hey, just like the team.

All of that probably sounds inconclusive. It hopefully points up that coaching never stops. It does come back to the hot take that the coach should be someone who is not currently in the CHLe.

Why? There cannot be any conflict. When I first thought of this, around 2013 or ’14, the first person who popped to mind was Gardiner MacDougall, the longtime University of New Brunswick Reds program builder. Since then, MacDougall has guided Saint John to the 2022 Memorial Cup win as an interim coach, and now helms the bench for QMJHL Moncton.

In principle, someone from outside the CHL also is not going to be burdened by having to evaluate players that his club team competes against the rest of the time. I have no info about whether that factored into player choices. You know what? It is better to remove any conspiracism and paranoia. Keep it out of the stream of the collective consciousness. It’s bad energy.

Hockey Canada can afford to put a head coach on a season-long contract. Have them coach the springtime under-18 team too. Try anything, something different.

There is not much more to add. Canada should take it as a compliment that other nations have caught up. Hockey and humanity win jointly when Russia is barred from playing.

Latvia, which has a smaller population than Montréal, won a piece of our hearts. They looked joyful, and played fearlessly, which you love to see.

They will not have a tangible medal from the tournament, but neither will Canada.

And that’s no skin off your nose.

Friendly reminder

I post about current affairs in Notes and on Bluesky (n8sager). Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.

Dec. 26, 2024-Jan. 3, 2025
Hamilton and Loyalist Township, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, Omámíwinini, and Mississaugas.

1. Some old-school junior hockey parlance. Players too young to have been drafted by the NHL, in their age-16 and age-17 years, are underagers.

2. Source: HockeyDB.

3. Coincidentally, Gallant was engaged to coach Canada in the lower-profile but lovely Spengler Cup this month. They lost in the semifinal; so much for a convenience sample.