WC: 2018 Division I, II, III

[mrkolice]

glad to see jan drozg playing a good game. been tracking him for years, he made a nice progress last season, the talent is there, just keep working hard. and he's got that extra sweet move. my only highlight of the game so far :/

 

[SoundAndFury]

If Estonia can get six points in their next two games against Croatia and Romania, promotion is a huge possibility.

I don't see them beating us, honestly. They play good defense this championship but those are the same people we beat time and time again with way weaker rosters than this year's one. Shumykhin and Koitmaa didn't turn into Lundqvists overnight either.

Croatia, meanwhile, is leading against Japan. This WC is nuts.

 

[kaiser matias]

Poland leading Slovenia 4-1 with 8 minutes left in the third. Not good for Slovenia if they drop this too, while Poland needs it to keep any hope of promotion alive. Really hope they do, would be great if Poland somehow got promoted again.

Edit, Poland scored

 

[HungryFrank]

I'm aware that Slovenia won't be an Elite elevator team soon, but I wasn't hoping for relegation to D1B.

Well, if it means Rakovec and Kontrec will go, than it might just be worth it!

 

[ozo]

Lithuania actually scares me. Seeing what is happening in 1A, this team could threaten promotion to Elite if they would be playing there.

 

[Namejs]

Lithuania actually scares me. Seeing what is happening in 1A, this team could threaten promotion to Elite if they would be playing there.

Not even close.

 

[Siamese Dream]

GB is ranked 24th BTW (i-did-not-know-this)
- beats Slovenia in game 1, good job

Lots of hard work done there in the isles in recent years
what comes to hockey....sit down, take a lesson FA,
what you guys doing lately? other than gathered **** loads of money.

We haven't actually done anything recently that would have had an effect on the senior team yet. Last year's dominance in D1B was the culmination of literally everyone being healthy and everyone actually turning up and playing their best hockey.

If you look at the team over the last decade it's mostly the same names every year. This year there are more new players than usual but most of them are the dual nationals. Erhardt and Hammond (plus Brooks who debuted last year) are all non-GB trained players who just play in the EIHL and have a British family background. Perlini and Whistle are the sons of former players who only played here while their Canadian dads were still playing. Kirk is the spare forward and Sullivan is the spare D so they're not going to have much of an impact. The only real legit debutantes are Ferrara and Betteridge.

If anything GB is going to go backwards again when the core of the current team is gone. The import quota has only gone up in the EIHL and while this may have been a benefit to the players who were already in the league, it's going to hinder new players coming in and this won't be helped by the collapse of the old 2nd tier the EPL, which has left a massive gap between the EIHL and the barely-semi-pro NIHL.

 

[Jon Riley]

Lucky goal but i'll take it.
Good match again so far for Italy. Good forecheck, close defence and good shoot suppression. I like that this team stopped being phisically destroyed by everyone. Winning board battles and managing to keep someone in the dirty areas is something new lately.

 

[SoundAndFury]

Lithuania actually scares me. Seeing what is happening in 1A, this team could threaten promotion to Elite if they would be playing there.

I would love to agree but it isn't so. We have big names but they really aren't playing that well because they are ancient, understandably. Zubrus got going a bit in the 2nd part of today's game but his line was mostly a dud before. Kasparaitis plays a decent role but doesn't contribute much outside of it and he doesn't eat many minutes either.
On the offense, we need our kids to grow up and pan out to be close to 1A level. Tadas Kumeliauskas is a beast at this level and I pray to baby Jesus he can stay more or less healthy for the rest of his career but he is the only one so far who would really be elite at 1A.
Long story short, this team is not going to get much worse when Katulis, Kieras, Kasparaitis and Zubrus won't play anymore (which is probably next year). It can also stay at this level without huge holes in the road because we have somewhat of a depth at this point. It can't hold onto the spot in 1A though. The teams there are just too good. We can legitimately challenge teams like Japan, GB, Ukraine which is a tremendous success considering where our hockey was 10 years ago but we are in no way ahead of them.

 

[Eye of Ra]

I would love to agree but it isn't so. We have big names but they really aren't playing that well because they are ancient, understandably. Zubrus got going a bit in the 2nd part of today's game but his line was mostly a dud before. Kasparaitis plays a decent role but doesn't contribute much outside of it and he doesn't eat many minutes either.
On the offense, we need our kids to grow up and pan out to be close to 1A level. Tadas Kumeliauskas is a beast at this level and I pray to baby Jesus he can stay more or less healthy for the rest of his career but he is the only one so far who would really be elite at 1A.
Long story short, this team is not going to get much worse when Katulis, Kieras, Kasparaitis and Zubrus won't play anymore (which is probably next year). It can also stay at this level without huge holes in the road because we have somewhat of a depth at this point. It can't hold onto the spot in 1A though. The teams there are just too good. We can legitimately challenge teams like Japan, GB, Ukraine which is a tremendous success considering where our hockey was 10 years ago but we are in no way ahead of them.

has Kasparaitis throwed any hits?

 

[SoundAndFury]

has Kasparaitis throwed any hits?

Yeah a couple but not anything spectacular. I think he's trying to not hurt himself before the key games.

 

[Rob]

Any NHL players playing in Division I?

 

[crobro]

Borna Rendulic

 

[SoundAndFury]

He is as close to an NHL player as Kasparaitis though I think Kopitar is the only one who could have played in theory but he isn't so there are none.

 

[TomB]

So Romania has sent 4 players home for partying hard I guess and will have only 10 forwards in tomorrow's game. What will happen next isn't clear yet, I assume they are going to try to get some kind of reinforcements from Romania but this is pretty sad for them. Especially since Croatia looks really beatable this year.

According to a post on the Romanian federation's Facebook page, the Ukrainian delegate challenged the eligibility of the Ukrainian-Romanian players and the IIHF deemed them ineligible.

 

[ozo]

According to a post on the Romanian federation's Facebook page, the Ukrainian delegate challenged the eligibility of the Ukrainian-Romanian players and the IIHF deemed them ineligible.

Makes sense. Couple of them totally were ineligible due to 4-year rule, but some of them should have been eligible already...

 

[Siamese Dream]

GB competed with Kazakhstan for 30 minutes then completely collapsed, not really a surprising result but it's disappointing after the first half of the game giving false hope

 

[SoundAndFury]

The real question in Romania's case, how the hell do you not run it by IIHF before the championship...

 

[TomB]

The real question in Romania's case, how the hell do you not run it by IIHF before the championship...

According to the aforementioned post, they did - they seem to think that they were okay.

I'm running by Google Translate here, but it seems that the local IIHF representative for the tournament said that they were okay. Following this, the Ukrainians called the IIHF headquarters and the representative decided that the players were ineligible.

 

[Alessandro Seren Rosso]

I would love to agree but it isn't so. We have big names but they really aren't playing that well because they are ancient, understandably. Zubrus got going a bit in the 2nd part of today's game but his line was mostly a dud before. Kasparaitis plays a decent role but doesn't contribute much outside of it and he doesn't eat many minutes either.
On the offense, we need our kids to grow up and pan out to be close to 1A level. Tadas Kumeliauskas is a beast at this level and I pray to baby Jesus he can stay more or less healthy for the rest of his career but he is the only one so far who would really be elite at 1A.
Long story short, this team is not going to get much worse when Katulis, Kieras, Kasparaitis and Zubrus won't play anymore (which is probably next year). It can also stay at this level without huge holes in the road because we have somewhat of a depth at this point. It can't hold onto the spot in 1A though. The teams there are just too good. We can legitimately challenge teams like Japan, GB, Ukraine which is a tremendous success considering where our hockey was 10 years ago but we are in no way ahead of them.

Since the talk is about Kumeliauskas, why he didn't play for some five or six years for the national team?

 

[SoundAndFury]

Since the talk is about Kumeliauskas, why he didn't play for some five or six years for the national team?

Injuries in '11 and '12, Kazakh league PO in '13, concussions in '14 and '15 and knee problems in '16 and '17. He really isn't the luckiest guy out there and he plays with an edge.

 

[filip85]

If LTU goes to D1A, will Zubrus decide to play one more year for LTU ?

 

[SoundAndFury]

No way, he only came this year because Kasparaitis talked him into it and they are both here since the championship is in Lithuania. There is close to 0% chance they want to go to some random country to play against some random teams. Never say never I guess but there is very little chance.

 

[jonas2244]

And the higher the level of play the less they can probably help. At this level they can do much with their skill level and their experience but at D1A they would have to pay the price for their age I guess.

 

[swissexpert]

Really surprised about Estonia! Points against former WC-Nations Japan and Ukraine, things have changed I guess..

Still don't think they'll promote as Lithuania is strong this year. But Croatia and Romania could be beaten too.