The Swedish Ice Hockey Association, or Svenska Ishockeyforbundet, is reporting that Carl Hagelin will be a member of their team in the World Junior Championships. Not a big shocker there. He's been a solid player and he seems like a guy who you'd like to have on your team in an international tournament.
The United States team will be announced tonight, so we'll find out just how short handed we'll be for the GLI. I don't expect it to be awful: Wild guess (which comes from no inside knowledge whatsoever--they don't want it leaked and I want to be surprised anyway) is that we lose Summers, Pacioretty and Rust.
The good news is that Louie Caporusso should be back 100% in time for the GLI. Red said that he expects Caporusso to begin skating on Saturday.
The other news to come out of Berenson's press conference is that they're skating Chris Summers at forward in practice. Red thinks that he has the ability to jump start his line and that he'll be one of our best penalty killers up front with his ability to fore-check. I love the move. If the goal is to get the best 18 skaters on the ice, then it makes perfect sense to move Summers up front. Vaughan and Quick have been pretty solid on the blueline. Llewellyn has been less so, but even he hasn't been bad and he's playing 2 out of every 3 games as it is.
Summers brings more to the table at forward than probably everyone outside of the top line, Rust, and Caporusso--and he clearly brings more than Lebler (who has been playing pretty dumb hockey as of late), Naurato and Ciraulo.
As long as our youngsters can handle playing every night, I love the idea of putting Summers back up front, where he showed the ability to be an impact player last year. Against the better offensive teams--or if we're in a pinch--you can slide him back. It's almost like we'd be dressing 12 forwards and 7 defensemen.
More later in the media roundup, including a commit that wasn't, but I've got to run errands before I get snowed in again tonight. If you think I'm going out with Wisconsin drivers during a snowstorm, you're insane.
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Summers at forward is awesome. I'm glad we have confidence in our D enough to do that. He brings everything to the table the hustling freshmen forwards do, but with more size and speed, though with perhaps less stick handling ability. I can't imagine how this could be a bad idea since it's so easily reversed, too. Oops, now you're back at defense.
Good stuff. And, thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I advocated this at the beginning of the season. So hooray to that too.
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