Saturday Night Hockey: Reformatting The World Junior Championship

Initially I wasn't going to post anything (a week of reviews/previews I figure I'd take a little break before getting back at it), but then I read what IIHF writer Andrew Podnieks wrote about teams staying up in the U20 main tournament, and I completely agree. It is hard for teams outside of the "Big Six"* to keep up with the competition and in the main tournament. Just on the first day, we saw the good (newly-promoted Denmark hanging on against Russia and forcing a shootout) and the bad (Canada running over Slovakia) of what the lower teams can do. But there aren't as many good moments as their are bad, and the bottom teams are left to see who is lucky enough to get eliminated in the quarter finals.

To even out the competition a bit, and give some hope to the bottom teams, the IIHF should look into adding a few teams. Now, the other tiers of the U20 are even at six teams per tournament, so they will have to find a couple countries willing to form U20 teams (on quick count, seven countries have teams at the World Championship level but do not compete at the U20 level). Assuming this does happen, I propose go back to an old World Championship format. The format would see 4 groups of 3 teams. All teams in a group face each other once, with the top 2 moving on while the bottom team go to the relegation round. The top 2 of a group (lets say Group A) merge with the top 2 of another (Group B) and face the other teams they haven't faced yet (in this example, Group C would merge with Group D). This round would determine the seeding for the playoffs.

Using how the teams ranked from last year, and adding in the top 2 teams from Division I this year (Belarus and Norway), here is what the preliminary round would look like:

Group A	Group B	Group C	Group D
Finland	Sweden	Russia	Canada
Slovakia	Switzerland	Czech Republic	USA
Germany	Denmark	Belarus	Norway

Note: Norway finished 10th last year in the main tournament. I have replaced that spot with Denmark.

After the first round, the seeding and relegation groups would look like this:

Seeding Group 1	Seeding Group 2	Relegation Group
Finland	Russia	Germany
Sweden	Canada	Denmark
Switzerland	USA	Belarus
Slovakia	Czech Republic	Norway

In this round, Finland would only play Sweden and Switzerland (since they already played their game against Slovakia).

The preliminary round would be played on December 26, 27, and 28. The seeding round would be played on December 30 and 31, so the two rounds cover the current round robin schedule (minus games on the 29th). Figuring out the schedule for the relegation group may be a problem, as teams play three more teams instead of two. There might be a longer layoff for those teams as the relegation round normally happens when the playoffs start. The current version has January 2th (quarter finals), January 3rd (rest day) and January 5th (medal games). With an extra game added each day, it might look like the 3rd, 4th, and 5th, or have that round in another venue. Relegation would likely go back to having 2 teams sent down to Division rather than the current 1 team.

There are a couple benefits with this format. The top 8 teams' schedule builds up throughout the tournament instead of going weak team-strong team-weak team-etc. which puts more emphasis on them staying consistently strong throughout the tournament. For the weaker teams, they get to test themselves against tough competition before going against similar strength teams. Another benefit with having a kind of AAAA league (to use a baseball analogy) is that the teams that do manage to stay up are more likely to get more funding to help them develop talent. Probably the biggest benefit is the exposer to strong teams that players on the weaker teams get. Granted, this benefit might not be as beneficial on a U20 level where a player has a limited window, but it will help strengthen the senior team.

There probably are better ways of fixing this tournament so the weaker teams can have experience at the main tournament and not be too much of a pushover. This way at least gives teams on the outside a better chance of staying up  and competing in the main tournament.

*Canada, USA, Russia, Sweden, Finland, and Czech Republic. At the senior level you could make it seven with Slovakia, but that's a point of contention.