Canucks playing well at World Championships

We are six days into the World Championships and it’s been an interesting event with upsets, late comebacks and stand out performances.

The Canucks representatives have made their mark for their various countries and since we are about halfway through the preliminary rounds, we can take a look at what they did.

The Canucks first line centre started the event as the top line centre for Sweden but has been dropped down to the second line after the Tre Kroner received some reinforcements from the NHL. This really shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing as the coaching staff looks to balance out their lines and get contributions from multiple lines.

Through three games, Pettersson has three assists.

His first came on this Patric Hornqvist against the Czech Republic. EP displays some fantastic awareness and makes the nice pass back to keep the play alive.

He later assisted on another Hornqvist goal with this nice pass:

His third assist came on one of Loui Eriksson’s tallies. Although he didn’t register a point on this play, this gif quickly made the rounds on social media

Yes, he was lucky that the defender poked it to William Nylander but it’s still a fantastic display of skill.

Gabriel Landeskog is expected to play his first game for Sweden tomorrow, so it will interesting to see how the lines shake out. But regardless, Pettersson and Sweden are serious contenders to repeat as gold medal winners.

The veteran forward has picked up one goal and three assists so far this tournament.

His lone goal came against Norway and was assisted by Elias Pettersson:

Eriksson has always played well for Sweden at these events and has done well so far this year too. Like Pettersson, Eriksson has felt the trickle-down effect from the additions but he had been playing well in his depth role as the veteran stalwart.

The tournament started with Markstrom not on the Swedish official roster after suffering a minor injury versus Finland in pre-competition play. That was done as a precautionary step to ensure that if Markstrom wasn’t able to go, they could insert some else into the roster. Markstrom was added a few days later and started the game against Norway.

He allowed one goal in the game picking up first win of the event in the 9-1 drubbing. He is 1-0-0 with 1.00 GAA and 0.941 SV%.

Troy from Richmond has worked his way up the Team Canada depth chart and is now playing on the top pairing with Thomas Chabot. His strong play also allowed him to score his first goal of the event

It was a lucky goal but sometimes you have to be good to be lucky.

Stecher has one goal and one assist in three games for Canada.

The older Hughes of the two brothers at the event has three assists and is plus-six after four games.

He has been playing quite a bit for the Americans despite being listed as the third pairing with New York Rangers prospect Adam Fox. In today’s game against Great Britain, Hughes played 19:14.

His first assist of the event came against France:

The second was on the overtime winner over Finland:

Then earlier this morning, he made this fantastic pass to Clayton Keller

The Canucks 2014 2nd round pick, Thatcher Demko has appeared in two games for the Americans thus far.

He is 2-0-0 with a 2.00 GAA and 0.920 SV%.

Although he gave up three goals to Great Britain today, that shouldn’t be of concern as the Brits played a fantastic game and were punching well above their weight class.

The Americans have split the games evenly between him and Cory Schneider thus far so it will be interesting to see how it shakes out for the remainder of the event.