denmark feature

Coming to Toronto (by way of Kindersley)

This December, Canada will feel like home for Denmark’s juniors, thanks to the 2014 World Junior A Challenge and 2015 IIHF World Junior Championship

Wendy Graves
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October 24, 2014
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As the World Junior A Challenge settles into a new home on the calendar it’s also getting ready to welcome a new team to the nine-year-old tournament.

But when Denmark makes it way to Kindersley, Sask., this December, it will have more than just a good showing on its mind. It will use the event as a tune-up for the 2015 IIHF World Junior Championship, which begins a week later in Toronto and Montreal.

“This was the highest level of competition we could get,” says Olaf Eller, the head coach of Denmark’s national junior team. “The World Junior A Challenge will give us a kick of speed and intensity.”

Eller anticipates his team will see more speed in Saskatchewan than in preliminary round play at the World Juniors, but the tactical level of the teams in Toronto will be greater.

“(The World Junior A Challenge) was the best competition we could get on small ice,” he says. “It’s a higher speed to play Canada (West) and Russia in the tournament, which is great for us.” (Canada East, Switzerland and the two-time defending champion United States make up the other group.)

Previously, the World Junior A Challenge was held in early November, a time that had been too early for some international teams to consider making the trip, says Dean McIntosh, the director of events and properties with Hockey Canada. Moving it back more than a month opened up a new avenue of preparation for at least one country.

“Denmark is able to get some quality North American competition, to acclimatize itself to one of the Canadian time zones and be able to go right from World Junior A Challenge to World Juniors pre-competition to the actual event,” he says. “It’s good sequencing for them and certainly good for us to have them in North America.”

Kim Pederson, the general manager of the Danish Ice Hockey Association, and Henrik Bach Nielsen, the body’s president – and an International Ice Hockey Federation council member – worked with Hockey Canada to get their country in the event for the first time.

This will mark the second time this season that Denmark’s World Juniors preparation takes it to Western Canada. It played in a four-team preseason AJHL tournament in Camrose, Alta., in early September, winning two of three games.

Most of the players who were with the team then will make the trip to Saskatchewan. “We expect to be close to the real (World Juniors) line-up,” says Eller. “We’ll go with a couple of more guys than we’ll go with in Toronto. There’ll be competition about earning a spot for the IIHF World Junior Championship.”

The team will have a one-day camp in October and a four-day camp in November, at which they will host a series of exhibition games against Latvia, Austria and Belarus. Those camps will give new players the chance to step up and earn a permanent spot on the roster, says Eller.

The team will come together in Canada on Dec. 11 – three days before the start of the World Junior A Challenge – although several prospective members will already be in North America. While some players are with club teams in Denmark and Sweden, others are spread across the Canadian Hockey League in cities such as Portland, Ore., Oshawa, Ont., St. Catharines, Ont., and Seattle, Wash.

There’s also a player with the Memorial Cup champion Edmonton Oil Kings: Eller’s son, Mads. Being the coach’s son, though, comes with no special privileges.

“It’s fun to watch him, but I don’t care that much about it,” says Olaf. “It’s fun to talk about afterward, but during the games and camps he’s just a player. (Olaf’s older son, Lars, now a member of the Montreal Canadiens, played for Denmark at the 2008 IIHF World Junior Championship.)

Denmark is still searching for its first victory at the IIHF World Junior Championship, having gone winless in both 2008 and 2012. While Eller hopes the World Junior A Challenge will help his team get up to speed on the speed it will contend with in Toronto, he believes he has a solid squad ready for the challenge.

“We play a pretty North American style – we have physical players, we have speedy players and we have smart players,” he says. “We have a pretty fast team and a pretty smart team.”

But it’s a team with, admittedly, modest expectations at the IIHF World Junior Championship.

“My expectation is to battle for the quarter-finals,” says Eller. “We hope that we can qualify for the quarter-finals.”

For more information:

Esther Madziya
Manager, Communications
Hockey Canada

(403) 284-6484 

[email protected] 

Spencer Sharkey
Manager, Communications
Hockey Canada

(403) 777-4567

[email protected]

Jeremy Knight
Manager, Corporate Communications
Hockey Canada

(647) 251-9738

[email protected]

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