Happy Monday, Monday everyone.
Women’s Worlds is rolling on in Denmark, minus any photographs we have access to. This is one of the weirdly frustrating things about the modern internet. If you’re serious about honouring the rights of content creators and not stealing from them, you find yourself asked to pay very large sums of money for photos from events that need publicity, and can’t possibly find a market able to pay that cost.
Teams won’t or don’t or can’t or never get around to making photos available. If they do — a lot of college teams are really obliging — they forget you want to publish with some haste. So it’s a nice thought, and not at all useful.
It’s not our job to be the PR firm for women’s hockey, and that’s good because if we tell you we like it, it’s fun, you know we mean it, and we aren’t giving you moral instruction. But there are times where our interests and the teams’ interests line up neatly and an agile organization sees that and acts.
Yes, I am going to tell the PWHPA that directly if they ever get their league off the ground. Until then, I’m just complaining of a Monday morning.
As of this morning, Canada leads their group on strength of games played, and Switzerland is third after an abysmally bad game by Finland against the USA. It was the worst game they’ve played in years. They really need to beat Switzerland tomorrow.
In Group B action, Germany had Sweden up against the wall shorthanded in OT and couldn’t convert. They lost in a shootout, but that loser point is going to help them out in rankings. Czechia is ripping up Group B so far, and looks to be the top team there.
Today’s games are Finland vs Japan at 9 am, a chance for Finland to get their act together. Germany faces Czechia at 9:30, USA takes on Switzerland at 1 pm, and Hungary and Sweden face off at 1:30. All teams in Group B have at least one point, and picking the ultimate loser who will be relegated is very hard — this is good, this means Group B strength is stretching out into more teams.
If Switzerland shows well against the USA, that’s also excellent. They got their first ever goal vs Canada earlier in the week. Remember: Switzerland is fairly new to this level of competition, they used to be the add on number five team in the group who lost every game. Now they genuinely challenge for points.
Canada plays USA tomorrow afternoon, and then it’s onto the playoff rounds.
Hardev has some recaps of women’s events, and you know where to find them, but here’s the most recent:
Recap: Victoria Bach impresses as Canada beats Japan 9-0 at Women’s Worlds - Pension Plan Puppets
Bach, MPP, and Fillier all finished with three points each
There is another BtoE out:
Back to Excited Episode 184 - Around the NHL (Part 2) - Pension Plan Puppets
Today we go from Nashville to Winnipeg and chat about the league
And today we have two T25 articles for you with another tie at number 12.
In hockey news, no one signed a contract in the NHL on the weekend. There are 18 total unsigned RFAs, led by Jason Robertson, Rasmus Sandin and Jake Oettinger, and there’s a few UFAs lest too.
A bunch of teams are over the cap, and have no obvious LTIR contracts to fix that, notably the Leafs, and no one is in a hurry to do anything about any of that.
The Leafs will be sending some prospects and young players to Traverse City after Labour Day, and then training camp will be upon us before we can say, wow it’s getting dark early. Until then, enjoy the last moments of summer:
