Interesting thread.
On the Edmonton board there was some talk that there were too many teams in the tournament and this was my response to a series of posts suggesting that there should only be a superpowers tournament, say 5 teams, this being my reply on that board that fits here as well;
This kind of makes me sad. Because I grew up with the the Czechs as a world hockey power, and among one of the top clubs every year. They have fallen off but wonderful memories and teams they have had at World Juniors through the decades. Been a long time though since they won 3 in a row at the advent of this Millennium, Slovakia and Germany also competitive on good days.
Like I said earlier the rules for this tournament that no players can be substituted, during a pandemic, that is really unfortunate, and the goal should be each team being able to bring their best possible team and effort. Not having to play B2B with 14 players. Think about that. 2 of those are goalies. 5 D, 7 forwards. Playing dead on yourskates the last half of any period.
You need as many clubs as they have to grow the sport and keep giving other nations chances to come, develop. I mean what would the Soccer World Cup be if they only invited 10 top nations?
Part of the spectacle of sport is upsets, heroic performances from underdogs. But a tourney should be devised in such a away that the lesser clubs even have a chance. Making a club play with 14 players is not even giving that chance.
Now one problem I would agree with is the scheduling. Boxing Day, Xmas Day, NYE, NY day need to be figured as absolute must watches and the games should be congruent. There should be at least 1,2 games that are big matchups. You can't have a complete day of games where none of them are legitimate match ups. I know they do this so that all the good teams can feel their way into a tourney, and never more important than this one where teams didn't get much chance to play leading up to tournament.
Now that said, I think things are framed inaccurately in the OP. From speaking with people on our board, and Canadians in general it can be somewhat hard to do Winter in NA, in Canada. We're used to our distraction of hockey to get us through Canadian typical winters and worse now during pandemic times as much entertainment and hockey has been stripped from us. So fairly hockey starved here. So that the frustration was not just that certain teams were in the tournament, its that the games were not being competitive at all. People just wanted to see some actual contests and the Juniors started out with mostly blowouts.
I will say this part, some of the teams approach is a bit wanting. Germany has the excuse of only having 14 players in the Canada game. So understandable that they got blown out. Austria was just bad period. But I called it from the start of the tournament, and its always predictable. Czechs were going to have a big day against the Russians and they mailed it in for several other games. Thats a problem.
Similarly Swiss viewed their matchup against Germany as the only game that mattered, strategically, to forward chances of advancing. Swiss played like that as well basically resting (or so it seemed) for the Germany game. Predictably there was no resemblance, the Swiss played the Germany contest hard, but didn't bring that same effort in the other games.
Not blaming the teams either, just using examples of not all the games being properly contested. Where teams strategically or passionately pick the games they show up in. Its unfortunate. But I'm not sure if its the compressed schedule that kind of effects this and has teams saying to themselves "this is the game". But if teams don't contest the same in other games it detracts from the tournament.
But I still want this to be a large number of teams tournament, again thats how you continue to grow the game.
