The short answer is Canada is usually pretty dominant at the tournament.
Over the last 11 seasons, Canada has won six gold medals, although five of those were won in consecutive years from 2005-2009 and they didn’t win another until last year. Canada tends to be streaky, with two separate runs of five straight golds since 1993 and droughts of seven and five years during that time span.
Everybody loves watching their favourite team win, and when your favourite team is also your home country’s team, the overall interest increases significantly.
Eyes On Isles
Canadians, as a people, identify hockey as their sport. Americans have American football and baseball. New Zealanders and South Africans have rugby. The English have cricket. And the rest of the world has soccer. But Canadians have hockey, and every game with players wearing their nation’s emblem and colours, no matter how old or young, is another opportunity to prove that “This is our game.”
Unless it’s the world championship. Nobody cares about that.
But the under-20 version of the tournament is different, and the biggest reason for that is it’s more than just about winning a single tournament played from Boxing Day until Jan. 5, it’s about promise. It’s about potential. It’s about hope for the future.
Someone once said a professional sports team is selling at least one of two things to its fans: wins or hope. If the team is good, they’re selling wins. If the team is bad, they’re selling hope. “We may not be very good right now, but things will get better! I promise!”
It’s a marketing technique as old as Adam and Eve. Politicians say some version of this pretty much every time they have a microphone or camera in front of them. It’s one we Canadian hockey fans know pretty well, because, y’know, our hockey teams are generally bad.
The only Canadian team that you can classify as playing well right now is the Montreal Canadiens (ugh). The rest of the bunch are either barely hanging on to a playoff spot (Ottawa Senators) or on the outside looking in (everybody else). In a league where more than half the teams make the playoffs, two out of seven isn’t a great ratio.
So what do we do when our team isn’t doing so hot? We talk about and watch our prospects! And where do the best prospects in the world play every year? The World Junior Hockey Championship!
Toronto Maple Leafs fans have extra reason to watch this year because of the amount of quality prospects from the team that’ll be playing. The Leafs could have up to five prospects playing in the tournament, including William Nylander, Mitch Marner and Kasperi Kapanen. These three should all be among the top players in the tournament.
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You’ll probably hear plenty of voices talking about how we, as a nation, put too much pressure on these teenagers every year for a tournament that most people outside of Canada really don’t care about. But when your favourite team is the Toronto Maple Leafs (or Edmonton Oilers or Vancouver Canucks or Calgary Flames), it’s kind of fun to watch your other favourite team and favourite prospects do well for a change, even if it’s only for 11 days in the middle of winter.