University stars shine bright
U SPORTS 5 CANADA 3
Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it, goes the old adage. Canadian junior hockey team head coach Tim Hunter said he wanted the older U Sports all-stars to push his young charges ahead of the 2019 IIHF world junior championship.
That’s exactly what the U Sports allstars, the best university players in the country, did in a 5-3 victory over the Canadian juniors on Thursday night at The Q Centre.
“[U Sports] is a good hockey team. That’s why we play them,” said Hunter.
The U Sports players, all of them former major-junior players who have filled out and are at AHL/ECHL pro level, pushed the juniors, almost all of them future NHLers, off the puck all night.
“We’ve got to get the [major-junior] CHL hockey out of our game and be smarter, and more detailed like they [U Sports players] were,” said Hunter.
“We have to learn from this experience. There were lots of great evaluation moments out there. We were slow with the puck and have to move the puck a lot quicker. We want to be fast. But it’s a work in progress. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a credit to the U Sports team. They are well organized. That is a good [equivalent] AHL team.”
Canada defeated the U Sports team 3-2 in a shootout on Tuesday night. The rubber match goes today at 2 p.m. in The Q Centre.
U Sports swept last year’s two-game set over Canada in St. Catharines, Ont., ahead of the 2018 world junior tournament in Buffalo, New York.
Maxime Comtois, one of two returnees from Canada’s 2018 goldmedallist team, remembers that sweep well.
“I saw it last year. That’s a really good [U Sports] team out there,” he said.
“We obviously still have a lot of work to do. We still have to figure out our chemistry. It’s a wake-up call for us. This series will help us clean up our game.”
Comtois was a part of the play of the night, but it wasn’t enough. A two-man breakaway ended with Owen Tippett of the Mississauga Steelheads displaying why he was the 10th overall selection in the 2017 NHL draft by the Florida Panthers, and Comtois showing why he began this season with two goals and seven points in 10 games in the NHL with the Anaheim Ducks. It was Tippett to Comtois back to Tippett to make it 3-2 for the Canadian juniors at 16:23 of the second period.
But those bigger, more mature U Sports guys got goals from University of New Brunswick teammates Kris Bennett and Mark Simpson to take a 4-3 lead into the second break. Holden Cook of St. Francis Xavier put it away in the third period by squeezing the puck past Canada goaltender and Vancouver Canucks prospect Michael DiPietro.
First-round Philadelphia Flyers draft pick Morgan Frost of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, on an assist from Columbus first-round pick Liam Foudy on the power play, and Arizona Coyotes-prospect Mackenzie Entwistle of the Hamilton Bulldogs also scored.
Meanwhile, Team Canada was set to make its first round of cuts late Thursday night. The 34 players in camp must be cut to 22 for the 2019 world juniors, which open on Boxing Day at Rogers Arena in Vancouver and Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre in Victoria.