Canada wins only world juniors tune-up

As a warm-up for the real thing, these were two heavy hitters — far from infield practice — a ground ball to the shortstop and over to first for the easy out.

Canada versus Russia, the only exhibition before the world junior championship starts Christmas Day, but maybe a prelude to a gold medal game on Jan. 5. Truthfully, it wasn't great theatre Wednesday because both teams also needed cans of RustOleum on the bench along with water bottles after not playing in 10 days since the clubs entered the bubble, but it was still the two teams who met in last year's final.

Canada won 1-0 on defenceman Jamie Drysdale's goal early in the third, but they also lost their captain Kirby Dach to a freak right-hand injury a few minutes later when he went to check Russian forward Ilya Safonov in the middle of the ice and came away shaking his mitt. He appeared to have damaged his wrist.

“He's gone for X-rays and we don't have an update yet,” said coach Andre Tourigny, who watched as the Chicago Blackhawks forward immediately skate off the ice and down the tunnel behind the bench with 12 minutes left, leaving his linemates Dylan Cozens and Jack Quinn without their right-winger.

Playing Captain Obvious, if the hand is broken or sprained, it's a damaging blow.

“Kirby drives the play, he tries to bring everybody into the fight,” said Tourigny. “He plays the right way, doesn't force the game.”

But they may be forced to play without him, and they can't just call up Fedex and have another player airlifted in to take his spot.

“I would assume the answer is no. After the teams come to the bubble, you can't add a player,” said Tourigny.

The Canadians are deep but Dach is an NHLER, who played about 20 minutes a game for the Hawks in the playoffs this summer. He controlled the play pretty much every shift he was on the ice. But Tourigny has enough weapons in his gun rack to juggle. Maybe he moves Cozens to rightwing and puts Quinton Byfield in the middle.

Byfield was a force, throwing his 212-pound frame into any body he saw.

If he struggled early in camp, he's come on and the No. 2 selection in the October draft (Los Angeles) was on the ice in the dying seconds as Canada held the 1-0 lead.

“Q was really dominant. ... When we left (camp/quarantine) Red Deer, we told him we were really happy the way he was competing and paying attention to detail and how he was trying to get better every day,” said Tourigny. “When we came to Edmonton, he kept going and he was rock-solid in every practice and got much better. I wasn't surprised by his performance today and there's a lot of players we could have had there in the last minute when they pulled their goalie, but there was a message there. He earned it.”

Igor Larionov's Russian juniors won the Karjala Cup in Helsinki against senior men six weeks ago, so they should have had less rust than Tourigny's Canadian side with 15 kids who haven't played a meaningful game since March. But Tourigny's team was better, even if there were ebbs to go with the flow in the exhibition as Canadian goalie Devon Levi, picked by Florida Panthers about five minutes before the NHL draft ended in October, matched stops with hotshot Yaroslav Askarov, who went 11th overall to Nashville.