Assembling Team Canada’s roster for the IIHF World Hockey Championship is trickier than working through a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Every decision triggers a cascading set of circumstances. Injuries and other commitments can quickly pare down the list of must-haves. The possibility of adding a few of those dispatched in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs is enticing, but also unpredictable.
“It’s a more involved process than you would think,” George McPhee, the co-general manager of this year’s team, said in a recent interview.
The work is well underway, with Bill Peters officially named head coach of the team on Tuesday, and the first batch of invitations to players now being distributed.
McPhee and the management staff – fellow GM Brad Treliving, senior advisor Doug Armstrong and vice-president of hockey operations Scott Salmond – held a conference call on Sunday afternoon to review the list of potential players.
A number of teams were mathematically eliminated at that point, but there were also some new possibilities to consider after the Boston Bruins dropped below the playoff line for the first time in months on Saturday night.
There’s obviously no guarantee they’ll remain there.
The real key is getting some roster cornerstones in place early and building from there. The bar was raised considerably last year with a team McPhee helped assemble – Claude Giroux, Tyler Seguin, Jason Spezza, Nathan MacKinnon, Matt Duchene, Taylor Hall and Brent Burns were among the early players to commit and then Sidney Crosby called and requested to join them after Pittsburgh was knocked out of the playoffs.
“That helped a lot – not only in terms of visibility, but the leadership that he brought, the experience that he brought,” said McPhee. “And we’d like to feel every bit as good about this year’s team when we get over there; that we have everything that we need to do to win.”
They should be helped by the fact seven spots remain open for the World Cup team, and a lot of worthy candidates will be available for the May 6-22 tournament in Russia.
The blue-line is particularly competitive – with P.K. Subban, T.J. Brodie and Mark Giordano among the possibilities – while Duchene, MacKinnon, Hall, Mark Scheifele, Sean Monahan and 19-year-old Connor McDavid are among the forwards who could be called in the initial wave.
(McPhee didn’t discuss specific players during our conversation.)
What’s clear philosophically is that Canada hopes to assemble a team with plenty of experience. There have been times in recent years where the country had to count primarily on young talent for the world championship and that played a role in the fact that last year’s gold medal was just the second in a decade.
“It’s a very intense tournament,” said McPhee. “There’s single-game knockouts at a certain point, and so you’d like to have players that have played under those kinds of circumstances already and are not facing these kinds of games for the first time.
“So you’d like to have some players that have been through in the NHL playoffs and played in big games. Having international experience doesn’t hurt, either.”
There will also be a focus on skill, just as there was with the group that rolled to a 10-0 record in Prague last spring.
That team was by far the class of the tournament – completely overmatching a stacked Russian team with a 6-1 victory in the gold-medal game.
“They played really disciplined, they played a style of hockey that was really entertaining, we didn’t try to run anyone out of the building but we did skate people out of the building,” said McPhee. “The players couldn’t have been better on and off the ice. Great representatives for their country.”
One thing the veteran executive took from the experience is the realization that even with a great team there are likely going to be some tough moments to negotiate.
Last year Team Canada fell behind Sweden 3-0 early in a round-robin game and endured a tight 2-0 semifinal under hostile conditions while facing the host Czechs. Those hurdles had to be negotiated before claiming gold.
“It’s a tremendous challenge for our guys, but we’d like to put together another terrific team and go over there and do it again,” said McPhee. “It’s different than anything else; when you win for your country, it’s really different.”
First they need to build a team capable of doing it.
