The junior national team will have to learn in defeat

Too many penalties and not enough goals.

This is the observation that the senior leaders of Junior Team Canada (ECJ) made Friday, the day after the Canadians were eliminated in the quarter-finals of the World Junior Hockey Championship.

If you’re looking for someone to blame, it’s mesaid the senior vice-president of hockey operations for Hockey Canada, Scott Salmond, to journalists who were trying to understand how ECJ was able to be eliminated for a second year in a row by the Czech Republic in the quarter-finals.

I’m the one who built this team.

Salmond also highlighted how he was disappointed and sorry for Hockey Canada, volunteers, staff and fans.

This is not unacceptable, but we cannot accept it.

We will work hard, improve and find new ways to win. Criticism should not be directed only at one person or a small group: we all bear responsibility for defeat.

Salmond was flanked by Peter Anholt and Al Murray to try to defend the choices that led to this hasty end to the tournament.

We didn’t score enough goals and we had too many penaltiessaid Anholt, who heads Hockey Canada’s under-20 program. These are the two factors that were fatal for us. When I look at our group, I love our team. We have a lot of talent, they know how to skate and we can do a lot of good things, but we didn’t do them. We also have to take our hat off to the other teams.

Asked if the lack of cohesion was due to the team not having had enough training, Anholt said the players were tired and decisions were made with current information.

According to him, the team did not lack chemistry.

We didn’t score enough goals and ultimately we didn’t win. This is probably the biggest problem. It has nothing to do with chemistry, because they are all good players, but in the end we didn’t score enough goals.

As for scout Al Murray, he defended the composition of this team and affirmed that he will not change anything from the group he formed.

I believe the selection process was honest and that we invited the players who most deserved to have a position, said Murray. I think we had a great team that could win the gold medal, but it didn’t happen.

For Scott Salmond, there is no question of a clean slate.

We must adjust things and aim for better results, said the V.-P. It’s not completely a disaster, but we need to rethink long-term success.

The Maple Leaf was limited to 13 goals in 5 games – only two more than Kazakhstan – by virtue of a shooting percentage of only 6.34%, the lowest of the tournament.

It was also the most penalized team with 27 shorthanded sequences.

“We deserved a better fate”

No one on the Canadian team had a smile on their face after Thursday night’s 4-3 loss in Ottawa.

It really hurts, said Bradly Nadeau, author of one of the Canadiens’ three goals, Thursday. We had a very good third period, but it didn’t go the way we wanted. It hurts. We’re going to have to learn from this.

The start of the match was difficult, but Canada experienced a resurgence in the last two periods. However, it wasn’t enough to stop the Czechs, who put the nail in Canada’s coffin with a goal from Adam Jecho with 40 seconds left in the game.

It’s certain that it’s difficult to lose like that, at the end of game. We can still be proud of the way we bounced back, but we deserved a better outcome tonightanalyzed Ethan Gauthier.

We had nothing to be ashamed of in the second and third periods, he added. We gave ourselves a better chance of winning, but the penalties hurt us. No matter how much we complained, it was the referees who made the decisions. OUR jobis to play hockey, to kill penalties when you have them and to scorer when they appeal to the other side.

The indiscipline of the Canadian team will have marked this tournament, as will the difficulty in scoring goals.

Ethan Gauthier believes that the team finally found its direction during the last game.

We had shots on net and we finished with the lead in that regard. We don’t have score as many goals as we wanted in the previous matches, but I think the intentions were there despite everything. We may have passed the puck a little more than we threw it, but it’s certain that right now, it’s difficult to explain what the problem is, if there was one.

As for coach Dave Cameron, he wasn’t very talkative after the game Thursday.

He said he had no regrets about his management of the team and that the tournament was as [il] s’y attendai[t].

The teams all wanted to win. There were no easy matches. We weren’t able to put all the pieces together at the right time.

Yes, there was pressure, admitted the head coach. That’s the goal of winning. There was pressure on the team, but unfortunately I think the pressure mainly came from social media, and that negativity was very unfair to these young players.

Like the team’s senior leaders, the coach and players did not want to say that the lack of cohesion was caused by the team’s lack of training. It also seems that good understanding reigned within the group.

Bradly Nadeau tried to be philosophical in defeat.

It hurts. We had a really good group, but we were a little looking for our own gameand there, it’s over. All the players here are going to have a good hockey career. We’re just going to learn from this and some players are going to come back next year and maybe they’ll have a chance to win.

With information from Jonathan Jobin