Cole Caufield and Lane Hutson are not known for their physical play and it may just cost them their Olympic dream.
When the Montreal Canadiens took on the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday night at the Bell Centre, Team USA’s GM Bill Guerin was there on a scouting trip ahead of the Milano Cortina Olympics. Sniper Cole Caufield and offensive defenseman Lane Hutson were on his watch list, and while they played well, they might not have shown what the executive wants to see.
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In an interview with Pierre LeBrun for The Athletic, Guerin explained that he has no issue with Caufield’s game:
I have no issues with his game; he competes like crazy. He’s dangerous offensively. It was good to see him play live again.-
What’s playing against Caufield’s candidacy, however, is the fact that he wasn’t there at the Four Nations Face-Off, where Team USA started to build its chemistry and where it became evident to the powers that be that space would be hard to come by in best-on-best competitions.
Given that finding, it’s not overly surprising to read what he said about the 4 Nations:
Honestly, I don’t think you can put into words how tight those games were. How little room there was to operate. And how well these elite players can check. In NHL games, they’re not always counted on to do that, but when they are, they can. And not everybody can play in those situations. No matter what their offensive gifts are, if you can’t check, it’s probably not the tournament for you. … There’s just no room out there.-
With the Olympic tournament being played on an NHL-sized rink, it’s safe to assume there won’t be much room there either. Can Caufield check? He can, to an extent, he has 18 hits so far this season, but those are not Brady Tkachuk-like kind of hits. Just like Lane Hutson’s 12 hits on the season aren’t either.
When all is said and done, it seems Team USA is betting on size and physicality, which are not two attributes in which the two teammates stand out. That way of thinking makes sense, as long as the games are arbitrated the same way the 4 Nations were. If the players are given less leeway, the Team USA brass could be making a big mistake, but we won’t know that until all the games have been played and a gold medal winner has been crowned.
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