Yesterday morning 11 guys were sent home from camp, trimming the US roster at the National Junior Team Evaluation Camp to a more manageable 34 players. If you've been reading these daily blogs you'll know that head coach Phil Housley came into this camp with his eyes wide open to clearly identify the strengths of this group so he can develop a system around them to give the USA the best chance at gold in Ufa. The fact that they didn't trim the roster to the usual 26-28 goes to show you just how minute the degree of separation was in their evaluations causing them to keep more players that usual. The hope is that as the week continues, the cream will rise to the top.
Their first official practice as a combined unit and with the team's actual coaches had a heavy focus on the transition game, power play and positioning. At one point during a breakout drill, Housley stopped the practice to yell, "Show some urgency here. You're too f---ing slow!" They're going to need that speed the rest of the week as they play Finland twice and Sweden on Thursday. Hope they took advantage of this rest day. They talk about practice and their off day plans in the Day 4 video blog…
The two european teams played each other yesterday afternoon with Sweden earning the 8-2 win with goals by William Karlsson (3), Viktor Arvidsson (2), Max Gortz, Pontus Aberg and Filip Forsberg. Like I said yesterday, the defending World Junior Champions are good at hockey.
Today, USA will play Finland at 4pm (watch live on fasthockey.com). Judging by the way things looked at practice yesterday, Gostisbehere, Jones, Reilly, Grzelyck, Trouba, Hartman, Galchenyuk, Miller, Gaudreau, Lucia, Kuraly, Noesen, Stolarz and Gillies will sit this one out. Not surprising as they've been some of the best players/lines in the first three games.
EDIT: Scratch that. Lines looked like this at morning skate:
Mario Lucia - Sean Kuraly - Stefan Noesen
J.T. Miller - Alex Galchenyuk - John Gaudreau
Tyler Biggs - Stefan Matteau - Steven Fogarty
Thomas Di Pauli - Cole Bardreau - Ryan Hartman
Nicolas Kerdiles
Jake McCabe - Connor Murphy
Matthew Grzelcyk - Garrett Haar
Shayne Gostisbehere - Andy Welinski
Brady Skjei
John Gibson
Garret Sparks
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While it's important for these guys to develop chemistry and learn their tendencies on the ice, we also thought it was important that they know how to spell each others' names so we decided to lighten the mood yesterday and play the name game. Here's what happened…..
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Day 1 Blog
Day 2 Blog
Day 3 Blog
Julie
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