Canucks: Arturs Silovs picks up a shutout, Myers’ Canada squad falls to strong Swiss side at Worlds

We’re now less than a week away from the quarterfinals of the IIHF World Championship in Riga, Latvia, and Tampere, Finland.

On Saturday, all four of the Vancouver Canucks players at this year’s tournament were in action. Let’s go over how each game went.

Arturs Silovs’ emergence as Latvia’s starting netminder has been the story of the tournament if you’re a Canucks fan. He’s led Latvia to some clutch victories and now has his home country in a prime position to qualify for the quarterfinal, which takes place on Thursday.

On Saturday, Latvia faced off against a very weak Kazakhstan team and took care of business. Lativa won by a final score of 7-0, with Silovs turning aside all 16 shots that he faced.

Conor Garland’s Team USA squad sits with Switzerland and Sweden as the only undefeated teams at this year’s tournament. USA and Switzerland haven’t required overtime for any of their victories, so both sit at 15 points in the standings.

On Saturday, USA beat Denmark by a final score of 3-0 to keep on rolling at this year’s tournament. Garland went pointless in the game, but this US squad is certainly one to watch as the tournament rolls along. They’ve been impressive, to say the absolute least.

Team Canada won’t finish at the top of Group B this year. On Saturday, the Canadian squad lost 3-2 to Switzerland, who as we mentioned, haven’t yet lost a game.

Two former Canucks in Michael Carcone and Tyler Toffoli scored Canada’s only goals of the game. Tyler Myers went with a form of defending that Canucks fans have certainly seen before on the game-winning goal:

The big story of this game wasn’t so much Myers being on the ice (literally) for the final goal against. Rather, it was Joe Veleno’s vicious stomp with his skate blade on Nino Niederreiter’s leg

Somehow, Niederreiter was the only player assessed a penalty on this play.

The stomp sparked tons of discourse among hockey fans online. Evander Kane chimed in and said that Veleno’s stomp is a prime example of why fighting needs to stay in hockey.

This year’s tournament has been a fun one to follow and we certainly won’t be stopping here.