Domaju

Timmins, ON • Canada • 25 Years Old • Male

Canadian World Juniors

So today is going to be an interesting game for Canada against the Swiss for a couple reasons. There's a positive and a negative side to playing Switzerland again. Let's start with the negatives.

The Canadians like to make pretty plays and a lot of individual efforts to get the puck into the offensive zone. They do dump it in, but on many occasions try to carry it in. Until they ran into the USA it was working and the other teams couldn't keep up or contain the puck control of pretty much any player on Canada. But the USA clearly paid attention to the free-wheeling Canadians and were able to easily stop it. Which leads us to why playing the Swiss isn't really THAT much better than playing the Russians. Switzerland knows what to expect. They know the free-wheeling will try and be dominant once again, which makes it much easier to stop. And being able to come back like they did against the Russians isn't a good sign. Yes we beat Switzerland pretty easily earlier however if that is in ANY way on Canada's mind the outcome will be much closer this time around. We have to hope that Canada doesn't look at the Swiss and think "we beat them easily before, this game is ours" because if they do, they could be in for a big surprise.

There are positives playing Switzerland again. We know what Switzerland brings and we should be able to contain it. If the Canadian players are able to change their game away from the free-wheeling majority offense they should still be able to handle the Swiss with some easy. And chances are that's something they've been working on since that game against the Americans.

The reason I say it's not THAT much better than the Russians is because at least with Russia they wouldn't know exactly what we bring...granted they have a good idea from last year, but we do have a much different team this time around and that could have worked to our advantage...especially since Filatov wasn't playing all that well. But I'm still a believer that playing the familiar is better than going in blind.

One of the key players in today's game is going to HAVE to be Kadri, as a Leafs fan I am happy at his play for the most part, however, he has been the most notable player to try and do too much. If he can calm down with the individual plays it will help Canada go a long way in hopefully making it to another Gold Medal game.

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