Temat: Senior Canada National Team

One more year! One more year!

Thanks to all that voted for me again! For those of you that didn't, well...we'll just leave that to your imagination.

As noted, I will be making 5 swaps for our roster, dropping Hiller, Stetterington, Hayles, Underwood and Grebe and adding Duxbury, Deschamps, McCarthy and Stevenson. The 5th player we'll add is TBD.

Once again, thanks to all and here's to another great season! Happy holidays!

Christian Benoit should be on your radar. Only 26. Will be getting a fair amount of I.1 time this year.

He very much is.

Can we not play VH in friendlies?

Only played the B-squad last week.

Played L/VL today with the A-squad.

Why did you delete it ?

Well, it's nearing WC season again. Have the roster picked out, so this week is about building chemistry up to 100 for everyone.

Think we should be significantly better with Lewis Herrling's impressive improvement this season that's seen him leapfrog Beaudouin and Carson to become the best centre behind Cochran. He'll be replacing Cyr in the lineup, which is a pretty massive improvement.

Of course, improvements on paper don't necessarily mean we'll be better on the ice. Hopefully they perform to the best of their abilities, especially since we've got a pretty tough round robin schedule, having to face France, against whom I'm 0-2 in meaningful games, followed by impressive Russian (a team we beat 2-1 in season 24, but that was 2 seasons ago) and Italian teams (this will be my first WC game against Italy).

I've also decided that, if we do not perform to expectations, which would be advancing pass the round robin at minimum, I will not run for another year, as there are some good potential candidates signed up, particularly Bobby Jay from Silence Stealers, who would have my vote if I fail to keep up among the top 12 countries in the world.

I hope our fans come out to support us in Denmark by the boatload. Go Canada Go!

There is no chance to become a manager if you aren´t canadian. So I end there even if I scouted lots of players and thought that I can build a great team there.
BOSSPP

We've slayed the beast! After two losses to the French NT over the past 3 seasons, we managed a well-earned 4-3 shootout win! This came after finding out we'd be without Kaleb Addison for the round robin, a pretty big loss, especially for our PK. Travis Underwood has replaced him.

We get Russia today. They lost the finals last year, but we have had head-to-head success in the past. It will definitely be an interesting game.

After a seriously bad loss to Russia where we got severely outclassed in a 3-0 loss, we managed to pick up a late goal against Italy for a 1-0 win on the backs of Bennett Carson's goal. This gives us 2nd place in our Pool and a 4th straight 2nd round birth, though we will only carry 2 points over. As such, I have again signed up to be GM next season, as promised.

This also means we will get to use the services of Kaleb Addison this year in a meaningful game, though he won't be at full health until the finals. We might therefore give him an extra game or two and keep Underwood in at least for the game against Serbia tomorrow. Hungary and Latvia are our other two matches to determine the medal round matchups. We're definitely going to go into this hoping we don't need to get anything points-wise from the game against Latvia. Home will probably have to face either Serbia or Hungary as well, as Craig has been worked hard so far.

Anything can happen, but we're still in tough here. Go Canada Go!

Correction: this will be our 3rd straight second round appearance. Apologies

Another thing I just noticed about our run of success here: we've moved up to 10th in the world rankings (up from 14th when I started) and have a legitimate shot at top-8 for season 27, depending on how Germany and Poland do (I think it's a safe bet at least one of the two will fail to get into the medal round), plus obviously our results. From what I can tell, old rankings aren't saved, though there'd be a long-winded way to figure it out (it'd involve checking every country's history and calculating them all manually...not really worth the time and effort), but I think it's safe to say it's been a while since we've been able to boast such a high ranking.

Following some minor lineup tweaks, we managed a YUGE 5-2 win against Serbia, led by a 4-goal performance by the powerplay and a dominant performance in shots (36-20), puts us back in the driver's seat for a medal round appearance. A win against Hungary would practically seal the deal, but a loss would be severe blow, so it's an important game. Latvia's performance has been underwhelming, so despite their reputation they might be beatable as well. Hopefully a win tomorrow will make that game meaningless anyway, particularly since we've had no chance to rest most our key players as of yet.

Gord McLean, who replaced Pannebacker in the lineup, picked up an assist on a powerplay goal in his first game under the current regime, while the 1st line came alive, picking up a combined 3 goals and 5 assists, lead by Steve Cochran's 2 goal, 1 assist performance.

Meanwhile, Kaleb Addison has been cleared to play and will make his tournament debut tomorrow. Who the odd man out will be is unknown, but there's some murmurings that Travis Underwood's performance, particularly on the PK, combined with Addison's uncertain status could result in the former remaining in the line up, at least for now. Stay tuned for details as they become available.

Go Canada Go!

Holy crap.

After a tough 5-4 loss to Hungary and a 2-1 regulation win against Latvia, along with some good luck on the out of town scoreboard, we made it to the medal round. We ended up with the powerhouse Czechs, a monumental task for victory...

And that's exactly what we got! Riding Kaleb Addison's early 2nd period goal and Ronnie Home's amazing goaltending as starter following Rowan Craig's poor performance against Hungary and Home's solid if unspectacular afternoon against Latvia, we've eked out a 1-0 victory to send us to a semi-final matchup against this afternoon's winner between Russia and Germany. The top-4 finish we will receive as a result will be the best we've had since season 5. At this point, however, our eyes are clearly on the shiny gold prize at the end of the tournament!