Canada embarrassed 5-0 by USA | 
American goalie Jack Campbell stood on his head, and his team provided plenty of offense in a 5-0 shutout win over their rivals from Canada yesterday at the World Under-18 Championships.
With the loss, Canada’s record falls to 1-2 and needs some help to make it into the quarterfinals.
The only scenario for the Canadians to move on to the next round is for Belarus to pull off a major upset over the Swiss on Saturday. The Swiss beat the Canadians 3-1 in the opening game of the tournament early last week.
One underlying storyline in the US-Canada game was Campbell’s win in a battle with Canadian goalie Calvin Pickard. NHL Central Scouting has Pickard ranked ahead of Campbell for this year’s NHL Draft.
Many felt the lopsided victory was partially due to the American’s ability to cut down turnovers, and keep control of the play. This could be attributed to many of the players on the USA team playing together all year. The Canadian squad was made up of Canadian Hockey League guys whose teams were out of the playoffs, similar to the World Championships when NHL players are eliminated from their series’.
With their win, the Americans will move on to the playoff round, but final seeds will be known after the aforementioned Belarus-Swiss game and the Canada-Sweden game on Saturday.
If Canada doesn’t make the Quarterfinals, it will be another huge disappointment for Hockey Canada and Canadian hockey in general in international play. Albeit, the best of the best Under-18 players aren’t competing, but a re-evaluation should be done of what exactly went wrong for this team.
Last year, team Canada lost in the bronze medal game and finished with a fourth place finish.
Topics: Calvin Pickard, Jack Campbell, NHL Central Scouting, Team Canada, Team Sweden, Team Switzerland, Team USA
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