S78 Championship Week

S78 Championship Week Due: Sunday, September 29th @ 11:59 PM PST

KlusteR
Registered
Posting Freak

#273

09-29-2024, 11:59 PM

Code:
1. CW TRIVIA, 3 TPE max - 1.5 TPE for participation, 0.5 TPE for each correct answer. This is completed through a Google form linked below. Make sure to spell your answers correctly or you will not get credit. Post your verification word in your CW post.

MooImACow

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12. Written, 50 to 200+ words. Is It Always The Same?

IIHF is short tournaments with only 12 round robin games for each team, which leads to huge swings from season to season when it comes to standings. Same is true for the WJC as well. With that in mind what do you think will be different from last season? Do you expect things to change for your team or player? And what you expect to stay the same?

While the IIHF format stays the same every season, the same cannot be said about the pools the fourteen teams play in, which changes the outlook for most teams, mainly in the "middle of the pack". Some teams tend to have a natural affinity against other, when it comes to roster composition, so the swing between the middle four teams of a pool can get pretty wild. Thankfully for my team, Switzerland, we're still riding the high of our generation, so we should be able to maintain our place in the top 2 teams of our pool, especially considering the fairly "weak" competition inside it. But make no mistake - there is no true "weak" team within the IIHF tournament, as even federations that are less "well endowed" as others will still have a few players in the 1500 to 2000 TPE range, which can change the complexion of any given game. This alone keeps the tournament interesting - tell me, who foresaw an Ireland vs Japan final last season, when there were so many other favorites to choose from?
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13. Written, 50 to 200+ words. Out With The Old, In With The New

Team Russia got replaced by Quebec, which for sure got people talking about the IIHF. What other nations/regions would you like to see get their own team? Would you think they should replace current teams and if so which ones would you seek to replace? And most importantly, why you think that teams you picked would be more interesting or improve the IIHF in general?

I, for one, am thrilled to see Québec make their way to the IIHF tournament, if only to see a bit of a renewal of interest in the tournament (I suspect that the ones that complained the hardest are also users that have yet to watch a single minute of the tournament on stream... but I digress.) That opens up the possibility of other "nations" that have a certain degree of independence to join the ranks, maybe even pushing the format to 16 teams in the future, which would allow for 4-team pools instead of the overcrowded 7-team pools we have today. A team in Scotland, in particular, would be one I'd love to see. Other "borderline" nations in the world, like Slovakia and Denmark, would also be nice to see represented in our league. All in all, the more we talk about the IIHF, the better it is for the overall health of the league, because it gives us something to do while our "professional" teams are on standby.
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