1. Verification Word: vagabond [up to +3]

10. I’m hopeful that the Swedish will take #1 personally, both in Pool A and for the tournament. I would also anticipate Finland to be a relatively close second, followed potentially by France or maybe Japan, but generally 1-4 and 5-7 feel reasonably well defined in Pool A. On the other hand, the only “likely” result from Pool B would be Canada and the US taking the top two spots. I know there are a few people putting Germany, Ireland, or Norway somewhere in the top two from time to time but they have a pretty significant TPE differential to make up for, or so I’d think.

I would expect the USA and Canada to make a pretty strong push to be opposite Sweden (or possibly Finland) in the finals, with an outside chance of an all-Scandinavia matchup. In terms of individual accolades, your guess is as good as mine. Although the top two scorers in fantasy each season feel pretty predictable in the SHL, that’s not nearly the case in IIHF, probably because there’s such a significant swing in management season-to-season with the IIHF. [184, +3]

11. I chose my IIHF country based on my last player and my intended country of origin when I wrote it. Swedish is actually my 3rd-most-practiced language in DuoLingo (after Spanish and French); I first started just to have one language significantly different than the aforementioned romance languages and just decided to stick with it because, why not? It’s also currently not possible to do ASL DuoLingo as far as I can tell (plus it’d be kind of odd to put on a phone app). I also didn’t want to necessarily hop on the most common countries (USA, Canada, etc) while still having a decent size community around the team, but it’s taken off more than I had anticipated. [118, +2]