Temat: U18 Canada National Team

It's a bit harder to do on the U18, but I always try to have some chemistry built up for the guys that will play next season. Most of my subs are 19yos with 50+ chemistry right now! It does suck if someone gets injured on the very last day. But I guess for that it pays off to be very last minute and set the final line-up on the very last friday.

Didn't help me!
Set mine about midnight on Friday.
Shoulda checked again at 5 AM when I got up, but (wrongly) figured I had covered all the bases by waiting "til the almost last minute. Perfection demands a high degree of attention to detail!! His replacement had a little higher OR but 200 less experience (119) and 60 less chemistry (30). The good newa is he will occupy a sub spot, and if required to play will improve overall as his OR/chemistry/experience goes up.

Yeah it's something I may try to do differently next season, if I am still GM, in order to build Chem a little bit to a backup for each position. We will see. Good news is that after the injury to my 2nd C, I moved up my 4C and he had a great game for us. Hopefully it keeps up!

Our boys pulled off another amazing victory. 3-2 against France, who finished 2nd last season.

My objective this season was to get out of preliminary round, because each team in our group was strong. Now we are assured of this, so we can move on to bigger objectives.

See you tomorrow, Canadian U18 forum, for more news on your beloved team!

Well, definitely Bob Leonard is the man for us this season. A 3-1 win against Spain eliminates them from contention and send us to the qualifying round on a perfect note. We will carry 6 points over to the next round and are hoping for even more success from our youngsters.

Leonard standing on his head again. Shuts out Switzerland 2-0 today. That puts us in the driver's seat for the rest of this qualifying round. We are already qualified thanks to our perfect route so far.

But playoffs won't be a piece of cake. We got tons of upsets so far, but no guarantees for more and our team is "weak" by top teams standards. Trader Phil and I will keep making what we believe to be the best decisions to keep us going as far as we can.

Go Canada!

This tight win against Finland assures us of a top 2 spot in the first game of playoffs. Nothing is won yet:that game will be tough with a worthy opponent for sure. However, there are reasons to be optimistic.

We would love to go further than last year. Another season of solid results should bring Canada's international ranking up a few spots.

Great job sir!

Our 19 games winning streak is over. To be fair, we played very high in all those pre season games against mostly other teams playing very low. Also worth mentioning is that we threw that game against Hungary in order to save energy. The result of this game had very little implication for the playoffs so we rested our starting goalie, and most of our 1st line in order to use mostly 17yo players and played our 4th line for 40% of the game.

In the end, with the way luck works, we will face Belarus in playoffs, which I feel could be a favorable matchup for us.

It all happens on the ice though. We will see..

Thanks to a 2-0 victory against Belarus, 4th is the worst we can do now. We are waiting for the next games to tell us who our opponent will be.

Keep up the great work!!

Congratulation on our second top division medal ever, Samuel! Go make it gold!

Thank you. I am very proud of what we have accomplished. I will try my best in this final game. It is another big challenge as it is a stronger team *on paper*. Playing away even though we finished higher in the standings frustrates me... But whatever.

At the end of the day, we have to win games and that's what he will try to do.

We fought hard. We did our best, but at some point we just ran out of steam. Even by winning tactics in the first two periods, we were down in the game. Hungary had a great team. Next year is bright for Canada with a strong lineup. I hope to get the opportunity to try again.

In the meantime, the loss of the gold medal will soon be forgotten and we can all be very proud of our 2nd place finish leading us to our best result ever (tied with PaulRoeb's performance of some seasons ago). Canada's world ranking is trending up!

Thanks for the medal Sam, Your tactical play and line up manipulation was how Team Canada has managed to climb to 6th in the world rankings with a challenged roster. I cannot believe the consistency you nail the opponents tactics.
Bravo!