Sweden, the USA, Finland and Czechia won the four quarterfinal games on Thursday at the 2025 IIHF World Junior Championship in Ottawa. As a result, those four teams will play for the medals on the weekend. The other six teams in the tournament have now been placed fifth through 10th and, as a result, the groups for next year’s tournament in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minn. are beginning to take shape.
Based on the serpentine system, this is what’s been decided so far:
One group: 10 Denmark, 7 Latvia, 6 Slovakia, bronze medalist, silver medalist.
Other group: 9 Germany, 8 Switzerland, 5 Canada, 4th place finisher, gold medalist.
Which group plays at which venue, as well as which one gets called Group A and which is Group B, will be determined by which one the USA falls into. Presumably, the host Americans will play at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, home of the Minnesota Wild, which has a much larger capacity at 17,954. The other group will play at 3M Arena at Mariucci in Minneapolis, home of the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers, which holds 10,257.
This doesn’t take into account the option that tournament organizers have to switch two teams in order to boost attendance. That could conceivably happen if Canada ends up in the opposite group as the USA, and organizers switch one of them in order to have both of them in the larger venue. That would also give organizers a chance to schedule a Canada vs USA game on New Year’s Eve. Minneapolis and St. Paul – the Twin Cities – are about a five-hour drive from the Canadian border at its nearest point and a seven-hour drive from Winnipeg, Man.
Also, with Kazakhstan being relegated, five of the six teams that will compete in next year’s Division I Group A are also known. The others are Austria, Norway, Slovenia and France. The sixth team will be whoever wins Division I Group B, which will be played Jan. 11 – 17 in Tallinn, Estonia. That team will be one of Estonia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Poland or Ukraine.