We're sneaking up on the halfway point of the 2018 IIHF World Championship, and Bo Horvat of the Vancouver Canucks is starting to emerge as one of Team Canada's key players in the tournament.
In Vancouver, we've seen his game grow and evolve over his four NHL seasons. This tournament is giving the rest of the country a chance to get in on the secret.
Horvat picked a good time to play his best game of the tournament so far in Canada's 5-0 win over Norway on Thursday. He added the other two goals on a night when Connor McDavid brought plenty of eyeballs to Team Canada with his hat-trick performance, in a late game that ran at a decent hour back home in North America.
Canada's win over Norway also proved to be a tasty appetizer for the NHL playoffs, where the Winnipeg Jets cemented their status as Canada's team by advancing to the Western Conference Final with their 5-1 road win over the Nashville Predators.
Coming off a two-day break, the Canadians looked sharp right from the opening puck drop. McDavid got his team on the board when he was left all alone near the net, just 1:23 into the first period. Then, after Connor took a high-sticking penalty, Bo got on the board with his first goal, turning on the jets on the penalty kill after a shot-block by Jean-Gabriel Pageau and deking out the Norwegian defender with a slick toe drag:
Bo's role here is a little different than what we see with the Canucks. He's being relied upon as more of a two-way player, and isn't getting any power-play time.
Horvat's second goal finished off the scoring at the 2:24 mark of the third period, when he converted a slick feed from Pierre-Luc Dubois.
After the game, coach Bill Peters praised Horvat's complete game once again:
He's a powerful guy. He's a big strong guy. He's good on the penalty kill, good defensively. Good faceoff guy. Obviously, shorthanded he was very effective here tonight; our penalty kill was very good. I thought they did a good job of up-ice pressure.
I think he's been developing some chemistry 5-on-5 with Dubois and Pageau, but also on the PK with Pageau.
I think he's a real good player and he is a well-rounded player, so i'm sure he's making an effort to hold onto pucks and make plays. That's something that'll continue to evolve as he gets older and more confident, in the National Hockey League and representing Canada internationally.
Earlier in the week, there had been some talk that Peters might move Pageau up with McDavid and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins to add a right-handed faceoff man to that line. On Thursday, he elected to keep Pageau with Horvat—and seems happy with what he got from that pairing.
Through four games, the only Canadian forwards with more ice time than Horvat (61:26) are McDavid (70:18) and Nugent-Hopkins (68:41).
When I covered Peters as coach of Team Canada in Russia in 2016, I quickly learned that he doesn't sugarcoat his opinions on players. If you recall, that's the tournament where the Canucks were represented by Chris Tanev and Ben Hutton on the blue line. Peters didn't know either player well going into the tournament but he quickly gave Tanev a home on his top pairing—and shuffled Hutton down the depth chart, to the point where he watched five games from the press box as a healthy scratch after being bumped out of the lineup by Florida's Mike Matheson.
On a team that includes other strong two-way forwards like Ryan O'Reilly, Brayden Schenn and even Nugent-Hopkins, Canucks fans can feel good about the fact that Bo's a player that Peters is really leaning on.
Earlier this week, we saw Horvat taking a leadership role off the ice when he was out playing golf with Canucks' goaltending prospect Michael DiPietro. On Thursday, it was revealed that Bo is also soaking up lessons from the best player in the game as Connor McDavid's roommate at this tournament.
Connor likes what he's seeing:
After the game, Bo said that two of the reasons why he signed on for Worlds this year are because he heard it was fun, and for the opportunity to learn and grow his game.
Bo's cousin Travis Konecny was one of the standouts for Canada last year, playing on the Kid Line with Mitch Marner and Brayden Point.
Horvat won a gold medal as a U18 player at the Ivan Hlinka tournament shortly after he was drafted by the Canucks in 2013. He was also teammates with the two-years-younger McDavid at the 2014 World Juniors, when Canada finished fourth after a 2-1 loss to Russia in the bronze-medal game in Malmo.
It's great to see him getting all the positive attention that he received on Thursday. It looks like he's adding more tools that will help him going forward, probably as the next captain of the Canucks.
In the past, I've compared Horvat's evolution as a pro to that of another former Worlds star who's two years older, Mark Scheifele. Scheifele had a star-making day on Thursday himself, scoring twice as the Winnipeg Jets punched their ticket to the Western Conference Final with a 5-1 win over Nashville at Bridgestone Arena, and setting a record in the process:
Looking at him now as a fierce, competitive, point-a-game two-way centre, it's hard to believe that the Jets went out on a limb when they took him seventh overall in the 2011 draft. He'd played just one year of major junior and was ranked 16th among North American skaters in the final Central Scouting draft rankings—behind forward prospects including Langley's Mark McNeill (2 NHL games) and Zack Phillips, who spent last season in the British League.
As well as being a best-case scenario comparable for Horvat, Scheifele's development offers hope for Canucks fans in this year's draft. Good things can come at No. 7, and don't get tooooo attached to draft rankings!
One other note from the 2011 draft to finish off today: top prospect and first-overall pick Ryan Nugent-Hopkins was listed at 164 pounds on the 2011 Central Scouting list. That's Elias Pettersson territory.
As a comparable, you can look at RNH two ways. Yes, he has endured his share of injuries and surgeries over his seven-year NHL career, playing a full 82-game schedule just once so far. But at age 25, he's now listed at 189 pounds, and he's actually third in his draft class in both games played (457, behind Gabriel Landeskog and Sean Couturier) and points (313, behind Landeskog and Nikita Kucherov).
Nugent-Hopkins has looked great here in Denmark and is reminding me that in the end, his skinny frame has not been an impediment to NHL success.
After playing his best game of the world championship so far against France on Monday, Pettersson was scratched from Sweden's lineup on Wednesday against Austria—where Anders Nilsson picked up his second-straight shutout in a 7-0 win. Apparently Pettersson has the flu. No word yet on whether he'll be ready for Sweden's next action, the early game of the triple-header on Saturday in Copenhagen, against Slovakia.
Vancouver Canucks Blogger • 
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