Team USA WJC Preview Notebook
We explore the challenges of preparing for a mid-season tournament, the importance of special teams, Captain Luke, and roles for the five Wolverines on Team USA
This evening in Quispamsis, New Brunswick, Team USA will begin its 2023 World Junior campaign with an exhibition game against Finland. On Wednesday, it will take on Sweden in Moncton, New Brunswick in a final preparation for the tournament’s Preliminary Round, which will begin a week from today.
The U.S. will play its four round robin games at Moncton’s Avenir Centre against Latvia, Slovakia, Switzerland, and Finland. The tournament’s quarterfinals will be split between Moncton and Halifax, before Halifax’s Scotiabank Centre (if you aren’t certain as to the corporate sponsor of a Canadian arena, Scotiabank or Rogers seem to account for roughly 96% of them) hosts both the semis and finals.
The Rush to Prepare & the Challenge of (Midseason) International Tournaments
The Americans arrived in the Maritimes on Sunday, following a week-long selection camp at USA Hockey Arena in Plymouth, Michigan. During that week, head coach Rand Pecknold—whose full-time job is as head coach of the Quinnipiac Bobcats—explained that a fundamental challenge of a mid-season tournament is the time crunch to bring together players from disparate teams and even leagues, take a week-long training camp to develop a mutual understanding of style and identity, and then travel to what always proves to be a frenetic two-week knockout tournament.
Traditionally, USA Hockey hosts a summer evaluation camp prior to players’ full-time seasons beginning, but, thanks to the unique placement of the 2022 WJC in August, the ‘23 summer camp was disrupted.
“It was a weird summer in that we had a camp but we didn’t have a camp,” Pecknold noted after the first session of select camp a week ago. “Because the two teams were combined and we lost eight guys to the other team [that played in the August WJC], so we’re trying to get guys up to speed.”
That unusual summer set up a week in Plymouth, during which Pecknold and his staff had to balance preparation with winnowing down the camp squad of thirty-two to a traveling roster of twenty-five.
“We can’t just evaluate; we’ve got to get ready,” Pecknold explained after the Monday session. “We’ve got to get ready to play Finland and then we got Sweden in those exhibition games to get ready for Latvia. I think the evaluation is going to come as we go. There’s plenty of drills today where we’re working on our neutral zone, and then we let the drill run, and it’s actually kind of a scrimmage and so you’re getting evals all over the place.”
According to Pecknold, a Wednesday scrimmage would be useful not just to experiment with different line combinations in live action but also because “we’ll get great teaching clips. Guys are gonna make mistakes, then we can show them and then we can teach them and then they’ll get better.
When Wednesday came, the U.S. blue versus white scrimmage took on a unique form: five four-minute periods before a series of two-minute special teams periods. Pecknold explained after that this format was conceived as a means of assuring quality competition with an unusual roster rise:
“We had one team with six forwards and one team with nine, so we didn’t have enough depth to really play a twenty-minute period; you don’t have any pace. That was just to keep the pace up and probably more productive, which I think is how it worked.”
After the final session of camp on Saturday, Pecknold emphasized that the compressed schedule of pre-tournament preparation necessitates prioritization:
“Over and over, I keep telling myself as we’re writing notes, what’s the priority today? Because we can’t cover everything and you just have to prioritize and you gotta cut some things out. I had some things that I was dying that I feel like we have to do before we play Finland, and I couldn’t get to them today.
“There were probably twelve things we had to do, and we weren’t gonna get twelve things accomplished today effectively. So we had to cut back because we still gotta get some flow and some shots for the goalies and some different things, so you’ve gotta kind of pick and choose, but I thought today’s practice was really productive. We did accomplish a lot, and we’ll do our best with the video to try to accomplish the other things.”
When asked about the balance between on- and off-ice instruction in this context, Pecknold said “So we want to play fast and play with pace, so we also have to have drills like that. When you teach things, there’s a lot of standing around, and you have no pace. So you’ve got to find that happy medium.”
Part of the magic of the World Juniors is its chaos: the world’s best under-twenty players getting together for two weeks of madness. Because it is situated in the middle of the season, it is inevitably less structured hockey than you get between teams who have practiced and played together for months. For fans, that is often a winning formula, even if it can be exhausting for coaches.
Leading Luke
Sophomore Michigan defenseman Luke Hughes will lead the Americans into Atlantic Canada as their captain. Hughes will be the sixth Wolverine to captain a WJC side, an honor last earned by Cam York who helped guide the U.S. to the 2021 gold medal.
In describing what it means to captain Team USA after Saturday’s practice, Hughes said ““Any time you get that credit and to be able to wear the ‘C’ for your country it’s a huge honor. I said to the guys, ‘If we’re gonna win this tournament, we’re going to need everyone to jump on board and be leaders at different times.’”
Pecknold noted that Hughes stood out, even on a roster full of potential candidates for the distinction: “We talked as a staff…and came to the conclusion that he’s our best choice. I think there’s a wide range of guys that could have done it, but I think he’s the right guy, and he’s excited for it.”
Wolverine freshman forward Rutger McGroarty—who served as captain of the USNTDP’s under-18s a year ago—emphasized Hughes’ ability to pull together different constituencies within the team to avoid divisions between different groups of familiar teammates. “He’s doing a lot team-bonding stuff, like bringing the guys together,” McGroarty said. “It’s easy for us to go on hanging out with our NTDP buddies or guys that we played with for two years, so Luke’s doing a good job making sure everybody’s hanging out with everybody, putting together groups of guys that maybe don’t know each other as well.”
It hasn’t been the smoothest sophomore campaign for Hughes, after a sensational freshman season a year ago. As a freshman, Hughes dazzled with seventeen goals and twenty-two assists.
This year, the assists are still coming (fifteen of them to date), but the goals have been harder to find (just three across twenty games so far). There have still been moments of magic, moments that make it appear Hughes is a grown man taking part in a scrimmage at his kid brother’s practice instead of a nineteen-year-old sophomore playing in the most talented pound-for-pound conference in college hockey.
One of his three goals was an end-to-end OT winner to seal a sweep of Western Michigan, which he punctuated with a bow for the Lawson Lunatics.
There are likely many explanations for Luke’s decline in goal-scoring from last year to this, and at least one of those is as simple as regression to the mean. The youngest Hughes brother perhaps scored a bit more than he should have as a freshman, and now probably deserves a bit better than the three goals he does have.
Throughout the week of practice, Hughes was up to his usual tricks—knifing through defenders on end-to-end solo rushes, whipping in blasts from the point, demonstrating an uncanny awareness of his teammates to find them with the most improbable of passes. Even against the best under-twenties America has to offer, an ice rink is Hughes’ personal playground.
The added pressure and responsibility of the “C” seems only to have sharpened the sophomore blue-liner’s focus, and the potential for him to leverage a strong tournament over the holidays into restoring his freshman scoring touch beckons.
Special Teams Imperative
“Any time you’re in a short tournament, special teams and goaltending is usually what wins,” said Rand Pecknold after Thursday’s practice.
He had previously noted his philosophy on goaltending, whether at Quinnipiac or for the U.S., is that “it’s going to work itself out.” The favorite on that front is Colorado College netminder Kaidan Mbereko, with Andrew Oke and Trey Augustine as relief options.
As for special teams, the Americans spent significant portions of their training camp trying to get on the same page. For most of the week, the penalty kill—a specialty of Pecknold’s at Quinnipiac—looked to have a clear advantage on the power play throughout training sessions. However, Pecknold pointed out that it always takes longer for a power play to find its rhythm than a kill, and the American power play had its most productive practice on the camp’s final day.
“I always think whenever you start a season, which is really what we’re doing, we’re starting our season,” Pecknold said Saturday. “When you start, the PK is always ahead of the power play. Always. And that’s what happened this week. And then today you saw the power play catch up.”
Pecknold’s captain expressed a similar sentiment after Saturday’s session. “The PK is always quicker to develop in their structure,” Hughes said. “I think it’s just repetition and getting to know each other’s tendencies, making sure we’re all predictable.”
He added that what takes time is “knowing our plays and knowing where our threats are and where we’re gonna score from. Making reads, it’s kind of up to us and just knowing each other’s tendencies.”
As for the penalty kill, Pecknold offered a snapshot of the philosophy that has helped make the Quinnipiac PK a perennial NCAA leader: “The big thing that we focus on is just a good, hard four-man rotation. And we don’t want to allow access inside our circles and allow people to make plays tight to the net. We want to make it goalie-friendly, which I think we do. We did a little bit of it in the summer, and they got pretty good at it, and today it was again a first taste of it, so it takes a little time to figure out. To me, if they’ve got IQ, they gotta compete, and they’re willing to block shots, we’re in a pretty good position.”
Where are the Wolverines? Everywhere, Really
All five of the Wolverines tapped for the selection camp earned spots on the twenty-five-man traveling roster. Of that group, Hughes and Rutger McGroarty were near certainties. Dylan Duke and Seamus Casey both entered with strong chances, while Gavin Brindley was something of a dark horse, having not been invited to the summer evaluation camp.
Throughout the week, Pecknold was effusive in his praise for the five Wolverines, hinting that the Maize and Blue would be well-represented in the Maritimes.
He referred to Duke as “the ultimate teammate,” lauding the Ohioan winger’s willingness to get to dirty areas and create space for teammates to make skilled plays on the rink’s perimeter.
Pecknold said of Seamus Casey “I thought he was excellent for Michigan in the fall. I think he kind of popped. I thought he was one of their better players, and then day one today, he was excellent,” before adding “he’s maturing at a nice rate.”
On Brindley, Pecknold said “he can skate, [he’s] skilled, very conscientious in terms of defending, and wants to play both sides of the puck. I like his versatility—he can play center or wing.”
In the end, all five found spots on Pecknold’s roster, though two from that twenty-five will only be available in the event of injury or illness.
Based on Saturday’s practice, McGroarty will play with Chaz Lucius (a current Manitoba Moose forward in the AHL, who spent last year at Minnesota) and Jackson Blake (a freshman at the University of North Dakota and former Chicago Steel linemate of Adam Fantilli’s). Dylan Duke will play alongside Miami’s Red Savage and Tyler Boucher of the Ottawa 67s (one of two OHLers on the team). Brindley and Sam Lipkin (who plays for Pecknold at Quinnipiac) were rotating in as extra forwards.
Meanwhile, on the back end, Hughes played alongside St. Cloud State’s Jack Peart, while Casey took his shifts with Minnesota’s Luke Middlestadt.
Hughes, Duke, and McGroarty all featured prominently in the team’s power play preparations, while Casey and Brindley appear bound for important roles on the squad’s penalty kill.
There will of course be one Wolverine competing against the Americans once the World Junior gets under way, with Adam Fantilli figuring to play a starring role for Canada.
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