Team Canada ‘apologetic’ for elimination from world juniors

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The three wise men who assembled the parts for the odds-on favourite to win the world junior hockey championship tried to explain how the team failed to reach a medal game in the prestigious, Christmas-time tournament for the second year in a row.

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In true Canadian fashion, the top dog began with an apology.

“The buck stops with me,” said Scott Salmond, Hockey Canada’s senior vice president of high performance & hockey operations. “The Program of Excellence is my responsibility, as is all national teams. And so like other Canadians, I’m incredibly disappointed.

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“I’m apologetic to Hockey Canada, to our volunteers, our members, to the fans here.

“It’s not unacceptable, but we can’t accept it. So it’s something that we’ll work very diligently on improving, finding ways to win. Again, it’s difficult.”

Salmond, head scout Andy Murray and management lead Peter Anholt faced almost two dozen members of the media gathered at Ottawa’s Delta Hotel in a unified group on Friday, about 14 hours after Canada had suffered a last-minute 4-3 loss to Czechia in a quarterfinal game at Canadian Tire Centre.

The script was almost identical to the result 12 months ago, when Canada lost 3-2 to the Czechs on a last-minute goal in Sweden.

Salmond wasted little time in defending the players.

“These are young men, very character young men,” he said, “and just like when you win, the credit doesn’t go to one person or one group of people. When you lose it’s the same. So we all share in the responsibility of losing.

“But I do want to commend the young men that represented Canada. I thought they did it with class, I thought they showed the Canadian way, particularly (on Thursday). I had told our group before, usually you get what you deserve. And I actually thought we deserved a little bit better.”

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Asked to explain back-to-back fifth-place finishes for a team that, in the two previous years had won gold medals at the world junior, Salmond initially said it was a little early to give a “definitive answer” before stating the obvious.

“There’s a lot of things,” he began, “but if you want to boil it right down, maybe too many penalties, not enough goals. That’s how we got here in the end. You saw us play games where at times we dominated and couldn’t score, and that’s, that’s hockey. Not to diminish the result, but that’s hockey.

“Those sound like excuses, but in fact, it’s reality,” Salmond continued. “Do we need to blow everything up and start over? I don’t think so. I think we need to probably fine-tune some things and look to get better results. We did win two in a row prior to losing two. So it’s not completely a disaster. It is in the last two years, but I think we’ve got to look at some long-term and the success our program has had as well.”

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The roster selection process has been widely criticized, with leading scorers in their respective leagues not being included. Those criticisms appear validated by the fact that, while outshooting their opponents each time out, Canada managed to score just 13 goals in five games.

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But staying true to the end, the brass defended the choices.

“What we were looking for was players that had talent but would also compete hard and I think we had that,” Murray said. “I don’t think we were short on talent. We didn’t score at times and that seemed to be a collective thing. I don’t know how to explain that.

“You look at eight shootout shots and we didn’t get a goal from the caliber player we have,” he continued, referring to the Latvia loss that shook the confidence of the players after the tournament-opening 4-0 victory over Finland. “It’s just one of those things that happens. But if you go and break down the stats of the forwards and the defence (in their leagues), you’ll see everybody has talent, they have good point totals.

“They can play creatively and they also brought two-way compete. We didn’t didn’t want to go with one-way players. We didn’t want to go with just competitors that didn’t have any skill. I thought we had a good combination, but it didn’t ultimately come forward for us.”

Anholt, who’s the GM of the WHL’s Lethbridge Hurricanes in his full-time gig, also defended the roster while commending the opponents.

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“We really felt we had a great goaltending group and all three goaltenders could have been starters for us, but, of course, Carter George was excellent,” he said. “We wanted to have a backend that could really skate and defend with their legs. And I think we proved that was correct.

“When it’s all said and done, hey, we didn’t score enough goals and I think, ultimately, we took too many penalties. So that combination of the two were lethal to us. When I look at our group, I like our team. I really think that there’s a lot of talent there. We could skate, we could do a lot of good things, and we just didn’t get it done.

“You know, you’ve got a tip of your hat to the other teams. When you put a team together and come to the world juniors, there’s four or five teams that could win this tournament. And the other teams try to, we’re not the only team that tries.

“So I think for the most part, I wouldn’t make any changes on the lineups that we had and the personnel that we had, I think we had a real good group. We had a high-character group.

“When it was all said and done, we just didn’t get it done.”

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