Hockey Canada to keep Scott Salmond as head of junior program

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Scott Salmond will get another chance to put Canada back on top of the junior hockey world.

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A day after taking ownership of his under-20 team’s surprisingly premature elimination from the prestigious global tournament in Ottawa, Salmond, Hockey Canada’s senior vice-president of high performance and hockey operations, received an endorsement from his boss on Saturday.

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“We are all disappointed that Team Canada’s World Juniors ended early, but I will say Scott is a tremendous leader of our men’s, women’s and para programs,” said Katherine Henderson, the president and chief executive officer of Hockey Canada, who went on to list a number of gold medals the country has recently won at different levels “for those of you wringing your hands about the state of junior hockey.

“Canada remains the number one hockey nation on the planet,” Henderson continued. “So I will be sitting down with Scott and we are going to talk about how we strengthen our programs for this particular tournament that we know is very, very important to Canadians. I also know that Scott and I, and Scott in particular because I know him, will work tirelessly to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Asked about what changes will be made, Salmond said it was too early to talk about specifics.

“You also don’t change just for the sake of changing,” he said. “We’ll look at our selection process for sure. We’ll look at how we build teams, and we’ve done that in the past. We’ve had a model historically where we build teams based on some sort of a ghost roster, where we had skilled players, we had checking players, we had players that brought energy. We certainly have experience.”

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Salmond went on to say earlier in the day he was asked by St. Louis Blues GM Doug Armstrong, who is also the general manager for Canada’s men’s hockey team at the 2026 Winter Olympics, about lessons he had learned from this experience building teams.

“He knows more about it than I do,” Salmond said. “We will be criticized and probably should be criticized about how this team was constructed, and we accept that as well. The irony is that as you never know, you could have taken different players and had the same result.  At the end of the day, we’re committed to success. We’re committed to a process, and so, more than anything, we need to look at the process, not just the result, and we need to make changes to that to improve.

“We do that win or lose, but we’ll spend a little more time and dig a little deeper into what that looks like this year, so that we’re better prepared next year.”

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