Firings coming to Hockey Canada for terrible performance at WJC!

For the first time in the history of the World Juniors, Canada has failed to advance beyond the quarter-final round for consecutive seasons. Canada’s self-inflicted mistakes led to goals throughtout the entire tournament, and fans are furious with the choices made by head coach Dave Cameron, but also, ultimately, the choices management made ahead of the tournament when it came to the final roster.

According to Kevin Dube of le Journal de Montreal, members of Hockey Canada will be held accountable. While many prefer to solely blame the players, who certainly have their share of responsibility, Dube believes biggest mistakes were made by the front office, starting at the selection camp. This is how he explained it, translated from French:

“These are the leaders who decided to send home very high-level prospects, and even completely ignore some, in favor of players who are fiery, intense and ready to accept their role. They insisted from day one that we had learned from the mistakes from last year and decided to focus on creating a “hockey team” and not an “all-star team”. “.

“But we never really got to see this hockey team.”

As Team Canada was struggling and looking nothing like a winning club, third overall pick in the last draft, Beckett Sennecke was watching from home. Last month, he was awarded the OHL Player of the Month for December, and that league’s best scorer, Michael Misa, was also just sitting at home, watching the disaster from ajar without being able to help.

Dube also points out that defensemen Zayne Parekh and Carter Yakemchuk were also not recruited into the final roster. And these are two players who scored 30 goals last year, at 17 years old!

On Friday, Canada management Scott Salmond, Al Murray, and Peter Anholt met with the media to discuss Canada's elimination and answered questions regarding what went wrong and the roster they constructed, via TSN. 

Salmond has been in his current role since 2018. He has been with Hockey Canada since 2001.

“Like other Canadians, I’m incredibly disappointed,” said Salmond during a media availability Friday. “It’s not unacceptable, but we can’t accept it. So it’s something that will work very diligently on improving, finding ways to win.”

He however added: “Do we need to blow everything up and start over? I don’t think so. I think we need to probably fine-tune some things… we did win two in a row prior to coming in and losing two. It’s not completely a disaster, but it was the last two years. But I think we have to look at some of the program’s long-term success as well.”

Dube also turns his attention to coach Cameron, whose work has been immensely questioned by fans or journalists, but also by former and current coaches at top levels, addint that Cameron never once held practice during the tournament.

However, Dube believes that for Cameron, a firing won’t mean anything: “he certainly won’t return behind the bench of this team. For him, life goes on, he will join the Ottawa 67’s and continue his season as planned.”

After last night’s loss to Czechia, when asked he had any regrets as to how the tournament played out, Cameron simply stated, “No.”

Canada’s lack of discipline also played a part in the quarter-final games as it did the entire tournament. And instead of sending a message and leaving some players on the bench for their indiscipline, Cameron kept saying that the WJC tournament was too short to start punishing players. Canada was by far the most penalized team at the event and was short-handed 27 times.

But as Dube puts it, the tournament was indeed very short for Team Canada.