Once again, thanks for your patience with these gaps between posts.
I feel like I'm chasing the North American hockey news cycle and when I do sit down to try to catch up on what's happening, I end up getting stopped in my tracks by Wifi issues.
As far as I'm concerned, the big news of the week is Cole Cassels' outstanding shutdown performance on Connor McDavid and the Erie Otters. The Oshawa Generals knocked out McDavid in five games and limited him to just seven points in five games to win the OHL championship, while Cassels picked up 12 points and was a plus-five.
Cassels finished the OHL playoffs tied for second place with his teammate Michael Dal Colle with 31 points—behind only McDavid.
The good news is that we'll now get to see more of Cassels on TV in the Memorial Cup, which starts next Wednesday in Quebec City.
I've mentioned this before—as a 20-year-old, Cassels' dominance at the junior hockey level has to be taken with a grain of salt. Plenty of overage kids have dominated in their last year of junior, then were never heard from again.
But the growth of Cassels' game this season has been truly impressive considering he missed the Canucks' 2014 development camp and was slowed last summer due to a bout of mono. After catching peoples' attention with his work against McDavid, he'll have another opportunity to make headlines during Memorial Cup.
He has already earned himself some fans around his home base of Columbus:
I suspect we'll soon start to hear the rhetoric that having Cassels push for a roster spot with the big club this fall will be a "good problem to have."
I wonder if seeing first hand how much Calgary has benefited from the quick development of Sean Monahan and 18-year-old Sam Bennett will help Vancouver's leadership group warm up to the idea a little bit?
World Championship Update
It is with a heavy heart that I acknowledge that tomorrow is the final day of the 2015 World Championship Tournament. I had high hopes for this experience going in and they have been surpassed in every way imaginable.
There's only one other Canadian writer on the beat here, so I've spent quite a bit of time this week with Terry Jones of the
Edmonton Sun, who's a World Championships veteran to say the least.
The venerable Jones is such a legend, he was featured in a two-page spread in the Czech sports newspaper today—where he pointed out to me that I am in one of the accompanying photos, from the Sidney Crosby scrum earlier in the week.
Terry pointed out to me after today's game what incredible good fortune I've had to get the chance to see a gold-medal game for Canada—against Russia, no less—in my very first World Championships. It's not like those experiences come along every day!
The Canadians impressed with a very different style of game today in their 2-0 win over the Czechs. We've seen Mike Smith play against the Canucks often enough to know how shaky he can be at times but he stood tall for Canada as the Czechs came out flying in the early stages of the game.
After the game, I asked Jordan Eberle about how he saw the game's first goal—a super-slick setup of his teammate Taylor Hall. That quote's in my CP game summary, which you can read
here.
I have to say, it was pretty cool to see how pumped Eberle and Hall were after the game. Having never made the NHL playoffs, these are the highest-stakes games they've played in their pro careers—and they were great today.
I imagine their center Sidney Crosby is also thinking that he could have used help like these guys on his wings in Pittsburgh this season.
So—after the young upstart Team USA played the Russians even for 47 minutes, the Americans ended up falling 4-0 to send Russia to the gold medal game—and pick the party vibe in Prague back up again. There are plenty of Russian fans here and the city had definitely suffered a letdown after the Czechs' unsuccessful performance against Canada earlier in the day.
Since the Americans played in the other bracket in the preliminary round—a couple of hours down the road in the smaller town of Ostrava—tonight's game was my first chance to see both the Russians and Team USA. Our Nick Bonino was a key part of the team and finished the tournament among the top American forwards in ice time with 15:26. He was a plus two but didn't exactly light the lamp offensively, with two points in nine games.
Bonino was not in a good mood when I spoke to him after the loss to the Russians. He felt his group had played well enough to win and was beyond bitter that the opportunity to play for gold had slipped away.
The American team will have a tough task, getting ready to face the Czechs and their crazy fans in the early game tomorrow. The Canada/Russia gold-medal game—Sid vs. Ovi—doesn't start till 8:45 p.m. local time tomorrow so there's no excuse for you not to watch. That's a very civilized 11:45 a.m. back home in Vancouver.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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