Your Gold Medal Preview

Tonight Team Canada goes for their 6th gold medal in a row at the World Junior Championships. Standing in their way is a rag tag group of college kids, some CHL kids, and one AHL player. Coming into the tournament, I thought the US would have to sell their soul just to medal, and after a heartbreaking loss to Canada on New Years Eve, that was reaffirmed. But after thrashing Finland in the quarters, they had a nice comeback win over Sweden in the semis to get to the gold medal game.

Their opponent is Canada, whose only stiff test has come from the Americans. Jack Campbell started the last game, but after Mike Lee’s stellar outing in the semifinals I am assuming he will get the call tonight. The US must be thankful for their day off as they were able to rest their top players (Danny Kristo, Derek Stepan, Jerry D’Amigo, Cam Fowler and John Carlson) who are guaranteed to get tons of ice time tonight.

On the other side, Canada’s Travis Hamonic will not play after separating his shoulder late in the semifinal vs. Switzerland. While it will hamper the Canadians, they are still the favorites tonight, although if they lose it won’t stop Canadians from using that go to excuse.

The big key for the Americans will be cutting down on the penalties. They gave Canada 6 power plays on NYE and, although they scored 2 shorthanded goals, allowing that many PPs tonight would be a killer.

The US has been actually very good themselves on the power play, scoring at 28%, although it was abysmal against Sweden.

The U.S. players to watch are Wisconsin’s Derek Stepan, who leads the tournament with 12 points, and RPI’s Jerry D’Amigo, who had 2 goals in the semis and could lead the team to a U-18 gold and a U-20 gold in back to back years. I will also be very intrigued to see how Mike Lee does in net. He stood up very well to the Swedes invading his crease in the semis, and if his defensemen can get the Canadian forwards out of there (which should be a bit easier since they’re smaller than the mammoth Swedes) Lee could have a very nice game.

However, this is Canada’s tournament, and maybe it is just the pessimist in me, but I look across the ice and see studs like Taylor Hall, Nazem Kadri and Alex Pietrangelo and I just don’t see how Canada loses tonight.

The Pick: Canada 5, USA 3