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.

Even instant star Nino Niederreiter came as no surprise to the scouts in attendance at Saskatoon.

Little done during the World Junior Hockey Championship will affect your chances at the draft.

I dialed up the scouts in my Rolodex this last few days. The grumpiest were still in Saskatoon. The slightly less grumpy were ones who were home from the tournament and thawing out. Happiest - or at least as happy as a scout gets - somehow avoided the tournament assignment.

One of the great disconnects between fact and public perception is that the world under-20s is a priority assignment for NHL scouts leading up to the draft in June. Such is rarely the case and maybe in no year has it been so far down the list as this year.

Those NHL scouts who made the trip out to Saskatoon were mostly doing check-ins on prospects that their teams had already drafted. There weren't really any great discoveries to be made in Saskatoon. Yeah, there were some draft eligible players but really, were Taylor Hall and Cam Fowler playing for their placements in the draft? Hardly.

Everybody in the NHL has seen them many times, dozens of times really. More reports on their progress are a waste of paper and bandwidth. The U.S. had a couple of interesting cases, notably goaltender Jack Campbell and forward Jason Zucker. But both of the aforementioned are in the U.S. under-18 program in Ann Arbor, so they've already been seen a lot and, barring injury or a change in circumstance, they were going to surface at the world under-18s, the real draft tournament. A couple of other American kids had passed through the draft or two but, again, no suspense, no mystery.

The Russian team had some interesting kids but was hugely disappointing and Nino Niederreiter of Switzerland looks like the real goods but a lot of scouting departments in the league made the call - worth having a peek at the tournament, not worth shipping the whole staff to eyeball the goods and risk frostbite.

Hockey holiday tradition or slaughter

There were many complaints about the lack of competitive games at the tournament and I suspect that in time this is a threat to its cachet. The idea that the world juniors is a time to don Hockey Canada finery to head to the arena or gather the family around the tube for a rite of the holidays loses some steam when the host Canadians are running up a football score against little old Latvia.

I have to turn into a rite of holiday punditry, namely my Rx for tournament qualification. Having qualification for the 2010 world under-20s based on the results from the 2009 world juniors just doesn't make a heckuva lot of sense. Okay, it matters not for the big fish, Canada, the U.S., Russia, Sweden and Finland. They're going to be there no matter how you structure qualification. They have consistently representative teams.

That is not true at the bottom half of the draw however. Teams in that range have good years and bad-and by basing qualification on the previous year's performance at the world under-20s is an inefficient way to assemble the best field. For instance, Latvia's under-20s were a pretty decent team last year but, problem is, the best players were 19-year-olds a year back and thus not eligible for the tournament in Saskatoon.

What should be the measure of qualification for the world under-20s is a national team's performance two years prior in the world under-18s. That is, the 2010 world under-20s would feature the top eight teams from the 2008 under-18s.

You might think the tournament would look no different. You would be wrong.

The fifth-place team at the world under-18s two years ago isn't even in this year's A pool: Germany. Yup, the same German 1990-birthday players who beat the Slovaks and Finns and at least kept games close against the host Russians and the U.S. will be playing in the under-20 B pool.

The players on the Austrian and Latvian teams in Saskatoon under-performed in the world under-18 B-pool in 2008 - there were two separate B pools and, in the weaker of the two pools, the Austrian and Latvian 90-birthdays finished behind Norway.

It's fairly certain that Germany, Norway and Kazakhstan could have made slightly stronger showings than Latvia and Austria. They were certainly more deserving of places in the field.

Right call on Seguin

I had to howl when I saw media pundits claiming that they were surprised that Tyler Seguin of Plymouth had somehow surprised or disappointed by not making the Canadian team.

Have they watched this tournament before?

I'd ask if they had seen Seguin before but that would be rubbing it in. I like Seguin as much as the next guy, maybe more than most. Still, it's all uphill for a draft-eligible kid to make the Canadian team.

Seguin has had a break-out year with the Whalers, just under a goal a game. Fact is, though, Seguin had 21 goals and about a point a game in 61 games with a pretty decent Plymouth team last year. As a centre, he was competing at the deepest position. His numbers actually look a little like Patrice Cormier's-except that Cormier brings a under-20 gold, an appearance in the Memorial Cup and two NHL training camps to the table, not to mention about 30 pounds of real beef.

That's the difference between 17 and 19.

There are five 91s on the Canadian squad. Three are on D: Windsor's Ryan Ellis who has been struggling, Spokane's Jared Cowan who loses a pint of blood every time he steps on the ice and Oshawa's Calvin de Haan, who was sidelined for a couple of games after looking pretty impressive.

The two 91-birthday forwards, Windsor's Taylor Hall and Brandon's Brayden Schenn, have been a lot better and more reliable than their blueline birthday counterparts. Hall and Seguin might go with consecutive picks in the draft and maybe Seguin will turn out to have a better pro career - anything can happen. But in terms of readiness, Hall had 150-plus major junior games before this season and Seguin under half of that.

According to the scouts I talked to, Seguin was easily the most impressive forward at the summer-18s last August and they find a lot to like in his game. It's a tough go to make the under-20 team with only one year of major junior experience, harder yet to have much of an impact. If it's any consolation to Seguin, he's in a position like Matt Duchene's a year ago and that seems to be working out better than alright. The team is selected on who's going to be the best immediately and not who constitutes the best prospect down the line.