Canada's Olympic team: Veteran or over the hill?
With 16 players who will be 30 or older by the end of the tournament, Canada is banking on a lot of greybeards and a few young guys. And what happened to Devan Dubnyk?
To save time and space, it’s more expedient to tell you which players on Canada’s Olympic team have no NHL experience, so here goes: Devon Levi and Matt Tomkins in goal, Owen Power and Mat Robinson on defense and Jack McBain and Adam Tambellini at forward. That’s it. And half of those guys are playing U.S. college hockey, which makes it impossible for them to have played a game in the best league in the world.
All told, Canada goes into the Beijing Games with a mind-boggling total of 4,526 games of experience at the big-league level. By comparison, the roster the New Jersey Devils iced for their game against the Dallas Stars Wednesday night had a total of 4,512. Of course, more than a quarter of that is consumed by Eric Staal, who now has teammates who were literally in diapers when he made his NHL debut in 2003. This is as heavy an NHL team as you’re going to find in a tournament where the NHL is nowhere to be seen, but it’s also a team that has an interesting blend of youth mixed in as well. And that makes it interesting.
Of the 25 players named to the roster, 15 of them are 30 or older, and that doesn’t include defenseman Brandon Gormley, who will celebrate his 30th birthday the day before the bronze and gold medal games. At the other end of the spectrum, it has three college players and one playing major junior hockey, that being 18-year-old Anaheim Ducks prospect Mason McTavish. That doesn’t leave many players who are in the primes of their careers and that could very well be a problem for this team, especially since it is playing on the 200-by-100 foot international hockey ice surface. But GM Shane Doan, who it should be noted posted a 28-goal season in the NHL at the age of 39, sees the age spectrum as a strength and not a barrier.
“I think we’ve got a nice mix,” Doan said. “We’ve got a mix of young guys, we’ve got some guys in their mid-20s, we’ve got some older guys. That youthful enthusiasm that shows up in the young guys early on in any season is always fascinating to watch and without a doubt, it’s noticeable. But you also notice those older veteran guys in the playoffs, those guys that have that energy in the playoffs when the games are on the line that have that little extra boost because they’ve been part of the game for a long time. When you look at the situation like there is with the Olympics, it’s seven games of just pure energy and I think we’re pretty comfortable with those guys.”
It’s an eclectic group to be sure. It includes 2021 first overall pick Owen Power on defense. In the space of less than a calendar year, he will have played in a World Championship, a World Junior Championship and the Olympics. Devon Levi is a 20-year-old goalie who was playing Jr. A hockey when the pandemic began and is now putting together a truly remarkable and historic season at Northeastern University. Levi, who missed all of last season after being injured in the World Juniors, has nine shutouts in just 24 games this season and is carrying a .948 save percentage. Levi said he realized he was on the radar for the Olympic team about a month ago when he saw his name on an Instagram post. Because of course he did.
“I saw my face with, like, 10 other goalies and I was like, ‘Wow, are you kidding me?’ ” Levi said. “I was shocked. I had no clue, like no clue, that I would be considered for this team.”
Levi will battle for the crease with two veterans who are playing in Europe – Edward Pasquale, who is playing in the KHL, and Matt Tomkins, who is playing in Sweden this season after spending the past four seasons in the minors. Pasquale was one of the best goalies in the KHL last season, sharing the league lead in wins with 25. And he’s a 31-year-old guy on a team that skews heavily toward age and experience.
NO DEVAN DUBNYK? WAIT, WHAT?
For a team with so much NHL experience, it certainly doesn’t have much in the crease. In fact, Pasquale’s three games with the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2018-19 are the only ones Canada’s goalies have seen in the NHL. That would not have been the case if it had chosen Devan Dubnyk, who said he was not selected because Hockey Canada was uneasy with him having played so little this season, just four games with the Charlotte Checkers of the American Hockey League.
“I was quite surprised, to be honest,” Dubnyk told Hockey Unfiltered. “Just with the direction things were moving, with pads and gear and all that stuff. They told me they just weren’t comfortable with me having played (four) games this year, which was surprising considering that was kind of known the entire time that that was going to be the case. That’s really what surprised me most. I felt I had been doing a lot for the past two months to prepare for this.”
Dubnyk wants to make it clear that there were no guarantees given to him, but that he had been following all the Olympic protocols and nothing had been pointing toward him not participating. That was why he was going to play in the Spengler Cup, which was cancelled, and went to Charlotte in the first place. He also went to the trouble of having two masks painted. “At the end of the day, they were right, I hadn’t played a lot of games,” Dubnyk said. “A little surprised. A little disappointed, but the fact is I hadn’t played much hockey. I was fully planning on going, so it was a little bit of a shock to have a change in the plans.”