Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

Those born in 1991, need not apply to play for Canada in the World Junior Hockey Championship.

The world junior tournament is the most popular sports event in Canada over the holidays; the only past-time that rivals it is second-guessing the selection of the national junior side.

Some years there's less second-guessing than others and often it focuses on one or two players at the bottom of the depth chart. Not this year.

I figured Windsor's Taylor Hall was a mortal lock for this team. I didn't think he was bound for the first line. Maybe it was going to be the second. At the very least he seemed to be in a similar position to John Tavares a year ago -a candidate to get more ice time as the tournament wore on. Scouts I've talked to thought pretty much the same thing. I thought Hall's performances playing on Tavares's wing in the OHL's two wins over the Russians in the ADT Challenge cemented the case. They looked like an electrifying tandem and were building chemistry that was bound to carry over to the world juniors.

When I saw Hall's name among the cuts I wondered what he had to do to make the team. Leading the OHL in scoring, being the lead forward on a team that has been at or very near the top of the CHL rankings all season, wasn't enough. Even if his game in the tryout camp was down a notch from his normal excellence it seemed like he still should have been good enough.

I suspect that Hall and the rest of the 91-born forwards who were invited, Brampton's Matt Duchene, Brandon's Brayden Schenn and Vancouver's Evander Kane, couldn't have made the Canadian under-20 team if they had flown around the rink with their capes fluttering behind them and bent crossbars in their bare hands. All were cut. Their last best chance -just for one of them to make it- went out the window when the Hockey Canada coaching staff decided to go with 12 forwards in the line-up rather than 13. Really it shouldn't have come down to that.

The best Canadian defenceman in this year's draft class, Jared Cowan, was good enough last year to be the lead blueliner for the Spokane team that won the Memorial Cup. This year he wasn't even invited to the tryouts. That's not because there's a surplus of talent on the back end either.

A few weeks back I wrote that there was a good shot that this was going to be the youngest ever Canadian team at the world junior tournament. It was, I reckon, only the national under-20s' youngest tryouts.

I suggested that there might have been a paradigm shift in assembling Canadian teams and that Steven Stamkos's and John Tavares's roles on last winter's championship team would have and should have Hockey Canada reconsidering its approach to the roster selections. In the past the coaches and managers looked at the world juniors as an 19-year-old tournament. That thinking seemed quaint given the successes not only of Stamkos and Tavares as under-agers (90s) last time out and the expanded roles of under-age players in other tournaments (e.g. Stamkos as the best forward at the 2007 under-18s, Duchene's, Hall's and Schenn's large roles on the 2008 under-18s). It seemed like a good idea to go with your best with no weight given their birth certificates-and that recent form showed that a lot of the best just happened to be 91s.

Guess what? It's a 19-year-old tournament again. Well, that's fine so long as they win and by rights, on home ice, with the talent on hand, with a likely advantage of goaltending again, they should. If not, let the second guessing begin. Or continue.

***

I spoke to a couple of scouts just before the invitations to the tryouts were sent out.

I asked the first if Angelo Esposito had any chance to make the under-20 team. He said that he had seen a fair bit of Esposito with les Juniors de Montreal in the last few weeks and that he shouldn't even receive an invitation to the tryouts. No chance. Couldn't have been more emphatic.

I spoke to the other about the crying need for a physical presence up front for any Canadian team in international play. I mentioned that I wrote about it in a column after the OHL all-stars' second win over the Russian touring team last month. In that game the Soo's James Livingston (a late sub for the injured Matt Duchene) and Barrie's Stefan Della Rovere filled those roles for that OHL team. The scout didn't dispute that the idea that some size and toughness was needed up front but he said the two players I mentioned-Livingston and Della Rovere had "no shot." I conceded he was right on Livingston given that he wasn't even the original choice for the OHL team. I suggested that Della Rovere had a better shot -not a big kid by any stretch but he did throw some vicious and, cough, mostly clean checks that had Russian heads on a swivel. Could he be Steve Downie redux? The scout's answer: He didn't see it.

Both Esposito and Della Rovere were invited. Both made the team.

Again, the Canadian team only has to win to head off any second-guessing.

You couldn't help but feel for Esposito. I floated that he had a shot a few weeks back. He must have had mixed emotions about getting his fourth invitation to the world junior tryouts -especially after Hockey Canada didn't invite him to the summer evaluation camp. He was twice a captain of the under-18 team, one that won the summer tournament. He was a kid well-liked off the ice by those who know him best. Nobody deserves the Dan Cleary treatment, the public ordeal of dragging your hockey bag out in front of the media at dawn of the darkest day of your career to that point. It's one of the most awful things I've had to cover-at least where no loss of life was concerned. No one would have ever had a less restful sleep than Esposito did that night before the cuts. According to one NHL scout I spoke to this week, Esposito's best moments in the intrasquad games came when he played beside John Tavares. There's no knowing if they'll play together in this tournament. If they do, it won't be a glimpse of the future of hockey but maybe a preview of the Atlanta Thrashers. Insert your own joke here.

Della Rovere was in a much better position to play his game at the tryouts. He went in completely under the radar, no hype, no burdens of expectations. And his role will likely be a much simpler one-he looks like a player who'll either fit in on the checking line or the fourth/energy line. He could be, like Downie, a name that fans will remember long after tournament. Maybe the Russians in the ADT Challenge didn't get his name but they'd have remembered the number.

***

Stuff that fell out of my notebook: I'm glad that Windsor defenceman Ryan Ellis made the team. Striking a blow not just for the little guy but for the other 91s in the camp. If Hall was at least in the conversation about the best forward in the OHL this season (along with Tavares and Brampton's Cody Hodgson) then Ellis was either the first or second name that came up when talk came around to the blueline. His play in the ADT Challenge showed that he might struggle a bit with the pace and physical play with elite 19-year-olds. That said, Ellis as a powerplay specialist is a good fit, a narrowing of his role from the under-18s ... When I spoke to Belleville's P.K. Subban over the phone, he told me that he had been paired with Ellis during the scrimmages. I'm not sure who the stay-at-home guy would be in that pairing, maybe the left winger ... Matt Duchene said that the most impressive aspect of the camp was the goaltending. "It's almost unfair," he said. "You start to think that there's no way you can beat these guys." According to a scout who worked the tryouts (and had no dog in the race), there wasn't much to pick between Tri-City's Chet Pickard, Spokane's Justin Tokarski and Montreal's Jake Allen. Tyson Sexsmith of Vancouver was not quite up to their level. The selectors went with Pickard and Tokarski over Allen and there was no clear No. 1 between the two on the roster ... Over the weekend London's Nazim Kadri told me that he figured that he'd have to make the team in a checking or two-way role. He did his best to sound positive about it but really the die was cast. Not his role, not his game. You have to give him points for coming back from a broken jaw. It's tough to make the u-20s, tougher with a mouth full of staples ... Yup, I wrote last week about the risk of injuries at the world juniors. Fate tempted. Ottawa defenceman Tyler Cuma goes down with a knee when he looked like a good bet to make the team ... I have to applaud the OHL for ruling that there will be no word of a trade for John Tavares during the tournament. An embargo like that on all trades over the course of the under-20s wouldn't be a bad idea. If only an embargo on rumors were enforceable ... One scout suggested that the best team the Canadian players will face was the one on the other side of the ice at the tryouts. In the past the tryout games were some of the fiercest stuff that you'd see in a hockey season. (I always wondered if the Canadian team that finished eighth back in '98 left its best stuff at the camp, which was especially brutal.) From all accounts, these tryouts weren't a war by attrition.