The last few world juniors cracked me up, "we didn't have Bedard/Macklin/Schaefer in the line up." It's a U20 tournament and its your national sport, you should be able to make a couple of competitive teams with your population and player base. One or two guys shouldn't be the difference in a tournament like that, it's not the Stanley Cup finals.
Canada seems to go through these cycles. It's funny that almost the exact same thing happened in Italy 20 years ago. Dumb roster selections (it was decided to not include Crosby on the team, for one example, but also guys like Jovanovski and Bertuzzi being included) and a Canadian team more or less 'expecting' a gold medal like it was their god given right.
I love/hate that about Canada. But we're a nation that gets its patriotism from a beer commercial and have an inferiority complex when it comes to America, so, like, what the fuck are you expecting?
The problem with this being treated as a 'down' cycle is that the American program has rapidly outpaced Canadian development and I don't think it is going to catch back up given how much more money and assets are put in American hockey dev, and instead of trying to keep pace, we're seeing shit like Hockey Canada getting into a slapfight with the BCHL (because they wanted to keep the US collegiate option open for players and ended up becoming an independent league after years of legal wrangling) rather than trying to keep pace with other countries.
Goaltending is a sort of microcosm of what is going on with Canadian hockey. Going back 20 years you had a number of guys (Brodeur, Turco, Price, Fleury, Luongo, etc.) and the current goaltending situation is fucking bleak, especially when compared to other nations and their goaltending development.
The other uncomfortable truth regarding this Olympics, and this isn't being meant to take away from America's gold, is that Russia wasn't participating.
I am pretty certain that Russia would have also provided problems for Canada, especially with the deep goaltending pool they had to draw on and how easy it is for a good goalie to get into a groove on such a short tournament. I don't think America would have had as much of an issue with them.
The sun is setting for Canada's dominance in hockey. I can't wait in 20 years when they start trying to hype pajeet players like they are generational talent and are instead awful.
It's been horrible being a Canucks fan for exactly this reason. They drafted some pajeet (Prabh Rai) and they couldn't stop hyping him up as some offensive dynamo who was gonna be the next great forward for the Canucks. Was there any reason to think this? No, he was a 5th round pick (for non-hockey nerds, the odds are incredibly low to turn into even a depth, low-tier player from that draft position) and his only real offensive standout year was when he was an overager in his draft+2 year.
Spoiler; he washed out and ended up stealing a bunch of izzat (
and $3 million dollars) in a fraud scheme against another pajeet businessman.
