Hockey Canada remains with choices after second straight World Juniors disaster

OTTAWA On Friday afternoon, Scott Salmond, Peter Anholt and Al Murray, the three men primarily in charge of Hockey Canada's 2025 World Junior team, stood shoulder to shoulder at Ottawa's Delta Hotel and answered 22 minutes of questions from reporters.

After Canada's first-ever consecutive quarterfinal appearance at the tournament, Salmond said it was on him.

The buck stops with me, said Salmond. The Program of Excellence is my responsibility. And so, like other Canadians, I am incredibly disappointed. I apologize. It's not unacceptable, but we can't accept it. It is something that we are working very diligently to improve. You can blame me. If you think it's scouting, I'll hire the scout. If you think it's coaching, I'll hire the coach.

In the end, he said, it came down to too many penalties and too few goals.

That's how we got here, he said.

However, they stood by their decisions.

Anholt, their management group in charge for the past two years, said he would not make any changes to the setup they used or the staff they had. Head coach Dave Cameron's decisions were 100 percent correct, according to management's view.

Asked about the work Cameron has done with the team, Salmond first spoke of him as a man of character he has known for a long time. After last year's quarterfinal loss in Gothenburg, Salmond said they wanted an experienced coach and pointed to the eight Hockey Canada events Cameron had been a part of and his experience as an NHL coach.

“I thought from day 1 of camp that we had an identity that we wanted to play and Dave stuck to that identity,” Salmond said. I think he pushed players in a way that Dave can. And at the end of the day Dave doesn't score goals, his job is to put players in positions to do that and I thought he did that.

Murray, appointed the team's chief scout after a decades-long career as director of scouting with the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Los Angeles Kings, said he didn't think their team, which scored just one more goal than Germany and Switzerland in the event and two more than Kazakhstan, had a talent shortage.

We didn't score at times and that seemed like a collective thing. I don't know how to explain that, he said. We didn't want to work with one-way players. We didn't want to just go with competitors who didn't have any skills and I thought we had a good combination of that. I think the process was a good process and I think we brought the players that we thought most deserved to get a spot, and I thought we had a very good team that was capable of a golden win a medal.

Anholt said they wanted a back that could really skate and defend with their legs and I think we proved that was right.

When I look at our group, I like our team. “I think there's a lot of talent, we can skate and we can do a lot of good things, but we just haven't been able to do it,” he added.

Salmond felt they were close, that if they could have come back from 3-1 down against the Czechs on Thursday night it could have been the spark they needed to ignite the team.

I told our group before (the quarter-final): usually you get what you deserve and I actually thought yesterday we deserved a little better, Salmond said.

He felt they dominated the game against the US and Czech Republic, at one point pointing to a 24-6 lead in their New Year's Eve match against the Americans.

Those sound like excuses, but in fact they are reality, Salmond said. Should we blow everything up and start over? I don't think so. I think we probably need to refine some things. Again, this sounds like I'm making excuses, but we won two in a row before coming in and lost two in a row, so it's not completely a disaster. It's been the last two years, but I think you also have to look at the long term and the success that our program has had.

They have also won the last two U17 tournaments, the last three Hlinka Gretzky Cups and last year's U18 worlds, he noted.

That should be an indication of success in the U20s, he said. Why wasn't that translated this year? That's something we definitely need to ask ourselves and do a little more research and spend a little more time thinking about.

The selection decisions, he said, were not political or based on emotion. They were calculated decisions based on winning, he argued. And sometimes you win and sometimes you don't.

But challenged about all the potential targets they left at home, and why this Team Canada didn't first prioritize skills and fit experienced players into roles, as other Canadian national teams have done before at higher levels, Anholt argued that he doesn't think that it really works.

You create a team that fits you into different roles and to be successful you have to do that, Anholt said. I don't think if you just look at the stats and get the most goals or the most assists, that's not really the case. I think you have to look at character, you have to look at how they compete in every situation and I think we felt comfortable with the group.

While Canada's 113 penalty minutes through Friday were 24 more than the nearest team (Kazakhstan's 79), Murray said that wasn't a byproduct of the emphasis they placed on bringing in courageous players.

Against USA he thought the penalties were deserved. He told the Czech Republic that he was not so sure.

“I don't think we expect players to take undisciplined penalties and I don't think players with skills are guys we don't want as part of the team,” Murray said. If you look at our players and go through the stats of all the guys that are in the team, they are all players with high skills and they bring the competitiveness that we were looking for. Sometimes it gets a bit away from you and that happened during this tournament.

When they announced their roster, they also didn't know that Matthew Schaefer, their power-play quarterback and a player Salmond thought was their best defender, would go down with an injury.

When we built the team, we built it on the group of players we had at the time. And we've got a (Tanner) Molendyk and a (Sam) Dickinson and a few other guys running power plays, we've got power play guys, Salmond said. (Canada's power play finished 4-for-19, a 21 percent clip that was sixth in the tournament through five games.)

While they talked about a lack of team chemistry, they were unwilling to say they should have practiced more, even after not having full training during the tournament.

That's a situation where you're always thinking about the fatigue of the players and the energy level, and the emotional level of the team, Anholt said.

It doesn't really work that way, he replied in a follow-up to building chemistry in practice.

And Why should (Canadian hockey fans) are confident that this management group has the answers for the future?

I think we've proven that we're doing things the right way, with the right people, so that won't change, Salmond said. I don't think the results are always indicative of the people or the process. (But) in our country you have to win much more than you lose, and that is what we sign up for.

Required reading

Why Canada's World Juniors battle shouldn't have been a surprise
After another disappointing World Juniors, Hockey Canada has big questions to answer

(Photo of Canada's Ethan Gauthier, Luca Pinelli and Brayden Yager: Adrian Wyld / The Canadian Press via AP)