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.

The team that isn't here but should be: Switzerland. The team that doesn't deserve a place here: the Czech Republic. 

Okay, a quick bit of background.

The class of '89 birthdays make up the core of this tournament's talent. Yup, there are plenty of draft-eligible players of interest well beyond Tavares and Hedman. And there's more than a healthy sprinkling of already drafted '90s. But it's the 89s, the 19-year-olds, who are the foundation that this tournament stands on.

The class of '89 passed through the under-18 tournament in the spring of 2007. Russia won the gold that year. The US lost to the Russians in the final. Sweden blasted Canada in the bronze medal game.

Switzerland, however, almost eliminated Russia in the quarters ... the Swiss had a lead late and lost in a tense overtime. The Swiss '89s ended up in sixth place in the tournament--Finland's 89's finished seventh, Germany's eighth and, yup, the Czech Republic's ninth and relegated.

Switzerland would be here but the IIHF's system of relegation and promotion often punishes and rewards the wrong players. Switzerland's '88s, a weak group, finished ninth at the under-20s in Pardubice in January, thus a very decent Swiss '89 class stays home. In contrast, the deeply disappointing '89 Czechs are still in the big show.

This set-up has frequently brought the wrong teams to the under-20s and diluted the pool of talent. Example: A decently talented French team, an aberration, qualified for the nation for the 2002 world juniors with an impressive performance in the 2001 under-20 B pool--the problem was that the kids who carried France to that performance had all graduated and sent a bunch of unprepared kids to slaughter at the hands of Canadian and Russian teams.

My Rx: Tie qualification for the world under-20s to performances in the under-18s--i.e., invite the teams that finished in the top eight in the 2007 under-18s to the 2009 under-20s and allow the ninth-and tenth-place finishers in the 2007 U18s and the top two teams from the the under-18s B pool that year to play down for the remaining two slots. 

I won't argue with you if you say this is a four-deep tournament. Maybe. Maybe it's five-teams-deep, maybe if you're generous six. Still, that leaves a lot of crap games. The talent pool isn't deep enough to start with. Unnecessarily diluting it doesn't make any sense.

Overheard in the hallways or stuff that dropped out of their notebooks: Reviews of Victor Hedman in Sweden's opening-game win over a game Finnish team: "Very smooth and skilled ... solid, about as good as advertised," one NHL scout told me. The real eye-catcher was Oscar Moller. Magnus Svensson-Paajarvi, the second-best draft-eligible Swede also impressed. MS-P's thumbnail: "He can fly and he will go into traffic and play a physical game."