Who is the favourite at this year's World U17 Challenge?

[HabLover]

The USA should be strong, even though they won't have a few of their top '88's with them. Team Pacific should be good, Ontario always plays strong and Quebec usually has talent, but I'm not well informed on those teams and the rest from Canada, Slovakia, etc.

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[cagney]

Ontario looks quite strong on paper. Outside of them it looks like a bit of a down year for Canada as a whole (at least when compared to their powerful squads of the last two U17 challenges - '85 and '87 birth years). I'm sure they'll have a couple teams make strong showings.

The Czechs would be much stronger if they were bringing their top players but they have a number of guys missing. The Slovaks aren't bringing Marcinko and Skokan so I doubt they'll be too strong. The US team has played better than I thought they would so far and did very well in their earlier international tournament, winning all their games pretty easily.