The most wonderful time of the year is upon us. For junior hockey fans, Boxing Day signifies the start of the Under-20 World Ice Hockey Championships and their favourite part of the hockey season. Our Halifax Mooseheads had a few players have a chance to represent their countries with Raphael Lavoie, Jared McIsaac and Ostap Safin being asked to join pre-competition camps. From those three, only McIsaac ended up making his country's team. Lavoie was among the first players to be cut from Team Canada last weekend while it seems like Safin was still too injured to play right now. For more info, check out the official U20 website here.
Canada started the tournament on Boxing Day with a 14-0 win over Denmark and will play 3 more times in the preliminary round on Dec 27 (vs. SUI), Dec 29 (vs. CZE) and Dec 31 (vs. RUS) before the medal round begins on January 2. All game times are 9pm AT.
Mooseheads fans should be particularly interested in the December 29th game as it will pit McIsaac against a former teammate with alum Filip Zadina making the Czech Republic squad. Zadina has played this season in the AHL so far this season with Grand Rapids recording 8 goals and 17 points. The 19-year-old is making his second straight appearance at the World Juniors after helping the Czechs to a 4th place finish last year in Buffalo with 7 goals and an assist. They'll look to improve on that this year.
Congrats to Jared McIsaac and Filip Zadina on making their respective teams. I'll try to keep you updated during the tournament.
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