THE WORLD IS COMING
Junior teams prepare to enter the bubble
They arrive in eight days.
Russia, Sweden and Finland will share a chartered plane together. Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic will catch another flight. And Switzerland, Germany and the IIHF organizers will arrive at roughly the same time on a third trip, all on Dec. 13. The Americans will charter out of Plymouth, Mich., and Team Canada will head up the QEII from Red Deer.
They'll all arrive from modified quarantine situations in their home nations, complete with departure testing, to begin four days of isolation in the Edmonton bubble before taking to the ice Dec. 18 to begin final preparations — including two pre-tournament games for each squad — in the final four days before the 2021 world junior hockey championship opens on Christmas Day.
“What makes this tournament so interesting is that we're all in different stages of preparation and selection,” said Hockey Canada VP of hockey operations Scott Salmond.
While Canada has 46 players to choose from, some teams are about to gather this weekend with only a handful of extra players over the limit of 25 they can take to Edmonton, not so much to cover themselves for injuries, but for positive tests involving players they would have to leave behind.
The Americans are taking 29 players to Plymouth on Sunday to begin putting together a team that features players from 14 different states, with 26 of them coming out of college hockey programs.
I wrote previously of Igor Larionov getting the attention of everybody in international hockey when he took over the Russian junior program, replaced the men's team with his kids at the Karjala Cup in Helsinki, and won the tournament. Most of Larionov's juniors are playing in the KHL and will reunite after games this weekend.
Finland shut down every league in the nation this week because of the COVID-19 numbers, but it won't affect the junior team. However, the Finns were denied the use of Kaapo Kakko by the New York Rangers and the unexplained exclusion of Aatu Raty and Patrik Puistola, who both played last year, and top draft prospects Samuel Helenius and Brad Lambert, is causing speculation.
“We'll see each other in a few days and have our quarantine week,” said team general manager Kimmo Oikarinen of the 30 players named to the squad.
“We'll first have seven days of quarantine in Finland and then four more when we arrive in Edmonton. Our players will be tested seven times during that span.”
While the Swedish Elite League is still going, the junior team begins camp on Sunday in Sundsvall with 34 players, 12 fewer than will emerge from a 14-day quarantine for Canada in Red Deer.
“That's a tough start for Canada, but they had the contingency covered and thus the long camp. We all battle the virus and just hope to get to the bubble in Edmonton safe,” said Team Sweden coach Tomas Monten.
Most of the teams headed here are as curious about Canada as any other team, mostly because junior hockey has been shut down in this country. Most of the players came to camp having not played for seven or eight months and the cursed host club is locked up for a 14-day quarantine until Tuesday as a result of two positive tests for the coronavirus.
Throughout most of the quarantine, Canadian coach Andre Tourigny and his staff have intentionally concentrated on keeping the players mentally and physically healthy, more than feeding them an overload of hockey information.
“We getting at it now,” he said during a telephone interview.
“When you're in a quarantine with 10 or 12 days to go, you want to take their head away from it a little bit and take the stress off. Now that we're getting closer, we'll start to get their minds back into the game, the positioning and the structure and all of it.
“We decided that four or five days before we got back would be enough. So now we'll crank it up a little bit.”
Tourigny said that he and his staff remain prepared to face a host of challenges related to the upcoming Hub City bubble adventure.
“Was there anybody who expected a 51-day experience without any bumps? Nobody,” he said. “We knew that this kind of stuff would happen. We had already talked about it.
“We'll have more adversity going forward. I went to the world juniors last year in the Czech Republic and the adversity we had in the tournament, in the competition and with the pressure, was unbelievable.
“From sickness, with half the team sick, to our captain making a mistake with the national anthem of Russia to a suspension to one of our veteran leaders to the injury to Alexei Lafreniere, it was adversity after adversity.”
Lafreniere, who went first overall in the 2020 NHL Draft, was also denied the chance to play in the world juniors by the Rangers.
“That's the world juniors,” said Tourigny. “Dealing with adversity and how you react to it is how tournament champions are built.
“We're ready for it.”