Quote:
Originally Posted by landshark
This is the only IIHF thread I could find...
WTH is going on in the world championships? I (from USA) saw that Canada lost the first game to Latvia of all teams and had a some giggles... Then I see the USA lost to Finland, Sweden lost to Denmark.
All teams have played two games and right now, the only teams with a perfect records are German, Kazakstan, Slovakia and Russia.
The worst performance is Team Canada who is 0-2 with only one goal scored for and 7 against. Even Great Britain has scored 2 in its two losses.
what is going on in Riga??
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Well for starters the rosters for all top countries are, relatively speaking, kind of garbage as many have said
It's not just NHL'ers that mostly didn't want to go, a lot of top talent from Euro leagues have said no to this tournament. (And no one's blaming them, it takes a lot of devotion to want to play in a bubble tournament with no audience. Although apparently the covid situation in Latvia has improved a bit so there might be some audience in the stands at some point.)
I think what this lack of big name talent has done is that a lot of the "smaller" hockey countries are extremely motivated, because they know this might be a unique opportunity for success. Watching the Finland - Kazakstan game it was obvious that while Finland still had the better roster, the kazaks were playing their hearts out and were ultimately rewarded with their first win ever over Finland after a shootout. And good for them! (Kazakstan have (I think) never won two games in one tournament, and now they have two wins in their first two games.)
...buuut it's also not unusual that there's quite a few upsets in the first games of the tournament, as the "big" hockey countries don't always bother to show up these early games, while every point matters to the smaller countries who are always fighting against the threat of relegation. The number of upsets tends to go down as the tournament progresses. Pretty sure there's some hurt pride in Team Canada locker room right now for example