Team Canada West head coach Joe Martin (Kingston, Ont./Alberni Valley, BCHL) discusses his team?s performance and takeaways from the World Junior A Challenge following a 4-3 loss on Thursday.
?During the first intermission we just talked about a lot of the same things we have been talking about with this team the entire tournament. It has kind of been a tale of two different hockey teams at times for us. If you compare how we played against the United States to our game against [Canada] East, it was almost like we were two different teams and it was the same thing tonight against the Czechs.”
?We really do have a great group. It is really tough on the older players that are not going to get another chance at this, and even some of our younger player may never get to experience this again. When you look at [Massimo] Rizzo, [Philippe] Lapointe and [Brendan] Budy, their compete level says a lot about them as players. There was a lot of pressure on them to work with some of our younger players and getting them to believe in themselves. It?s always tough to not move on to the semifinals, but I think that belief in ourselves just took a little too long to come out.?
Game stats available here.
Next games ? Friday, Dec. 13:
- United States vs. Russia at 2 p.m. MT
- Canada East vs. Czech Republic at 7 p.m. MT
TSN and RDS, the official broadcast partners of Hockey Canada, will broadcast the bronze and gold medal games on Sunday, Dec. 15; please check local listings for details. All preliminary-round games and the semifinals will be live streamed at HockeyCanada.ca/WJAC.
For more information on the 2019 World Junior A Challenge, please visit HockeyCanada.ca or follow along via social media on Twitter.