Welcome back! It’s Monday.
The World Championships have wrapped up, and some Bruins are coming home with a medal!
Henri Jokiharju and Joonas Korpisalo, who have been riding Finland’s return to the top of the mountain with the return of Sasha Barkov and the rise of Konsta Helenius to a Gold Medal finish over the home town Swiss. This run includes convincing wins over a lot of really good teams and also Great Britain, with their signature wins being their beatdown of Canada, the US, and a nailbiter of a revenge
game against Switzerland, who once again decided it was their year to be good enough to scare all the other teams into wondering if there’s something in the Swiss Alps that’s making these players good. Jokiharju ended up having a fantastic championship; finishing the tourney with 8 points in 10 games. Great stuff from him!
Congrats to Jokiharju and Korpi for their medals! And hey, Congrats to Norway on their first ever medal at the World Championships? That’s kinda crazy.
Oh yeah, and Ukraine and Kazakhstan get to show up next year to the World Championships. Right as Russia is now on a probationary period with the IIHF, and may end up finding themselves playing Russians at the U18 level not too long from now.
That’ll be good and awkward, I’d imagine.
The Stanley Cup Finals meanwhile, now have their reps from the Eastern and Western Conferences; the Golden Knights finally clicking at the perfect time, and the Carolina Hurricanes, who beat the brakes off of Montreal in five games to suggests that their initial win was less a quality team beating another quality team so much as it was Carolina struggling to reach behind themselves in time to grab their belt in order to use it as a whuppin’ implement.
This of course, is prime hater material in either direction. Carolina has at long last gotten over the Eastern Conference Finals hump (we should all be so lucky) and has been as rested as any team ever has been. Rod Brind’Amour’s unique blend of obnoxious media bending and choking system that makes the Hurricanes uniquely suited to making mincemeat of the playoffs to this point.
And on the other side, you have the “F#!k Morals” team over here; giving money to Carter Hart and one of his key witnesses Brett Howden…as well as Mark Stone, Jack Eichel, and Mitch Marner. Marner specifically at the height of his powers.
I’m just saying if you wanted reasons to dislike these clubs, it’s not exactly hard to come up with perfectly reasonable and justifiable reasons to hate one over the other or both. This is a final in which likeability is determined entirely by which individual player you’d like to see hold the Stanley Cup and then turn the TV the minute they pass it to another player. For me? It’s Taylor Hall and Eric Tulsky, and if you had a gun to my head to pick a Vegas player, I’d have to go Bill Karlsson or Mitch Marner. But that’s only if I could see the hammer was already cocked back and ready to send me to hell post-haste.
So naturally the thing that was brought up first was…TV Ratings??? Like…was the creep goalie and his creep teammate not enough?????????????????
I dunno, man. I’d figure that was a layup for reasons to not want to support this final.
I’ll go write about this in another post.
Anyway! Canada hasn’t medaled in a hot minute! Referendum time or just the natural consequence of the tournament being a very minor event in comparison to the Olympics?
