The Under 19 World Junior Champions for ice hockey are being played in Vancouver this year. The best players representing 8 different countries play in the yearly tournament. It’s a great way to get a look at some of the best prospects in hockey. The tournament is hugely popular here in Canada, with sellout crowds to each Team Canada team and TSN, and large nation-wide sports network, broadcasting the games coast to coast.
Today, Canada played the US in both teams’ final round-robin game. The winner would take the top seed and a bye into the semi-finals. Coming into the tournament, the US was a heavy favourite who hasn’t played up to expectations while Canada has played relatively well, admittedly against inferior opponents. The game was tough but clean until the final minutes. Canada scored an empty-net goal with 30 seconds to go to take a 3-2 lead, and everyone in the building knew that the game was over – the Americans needed to win outright to pass Canada, and they weren’t going to score 2 goals in 30 seconds. Before Canada could even celebrate the goal, American defencemen Jack Johnson took out a Canadian player with a vicious flying elbow. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, I’ll try to describe it to you. Take your elbow and wrap it in extremely hard plastic. Now take a running start, raise your elbow, and right before you connect with your opponent’s head, jump at him. That’s the flying elbow, and as you can imagine it’s extraordinarily dangerous and very illegal. The IIHF, which administers the tournament, has somehow decided that this merits no punishment beyond the penalty he served in the last 30 seconds of a game that was over.
This is pure, unmitigated bullshit. In a real league Johnson would probably be facing a 10 game suspension for such a vicious and obvious attempt to injure an opponent because his team was losing. But Johnson is the US’s best player, so apparently he has carte blanche. The IIHF has proven once again that they don’t know a thing about good hockey. One would hope that even the Europeans could recognize an ugly hit when they see one, but apparently not.
As for Johnson, he’ll get his. We’ll see you again in the finals you fucking coward.