THN Archive: Win Or Lose, Canadians Crave All The Drama World Junior Championship Brings

Team Canada suffered a disappointing quarterfinal loss at the 2024 IIHF World Junior Championship, but nothing will diminish the fixation Canadians have for the tournament. And in this feature story from The Hockey News’ Dec. 31, 2012 edition, writer Adam Proteau wrote about all the different reasons Canada adores the world juniors.

(And here’s a reminder – to get complete access to THN’s exclusive 76-year Archive, you can subscribe to the magazine.)

It’s obvious Canadians want to see their team win the WJC each and every year, but even when the results aren’t to their liking, they still watch in droves. In the feature article, Proteau noted that at the 2012 WJC, the average attendance for games that Canada wasn’t playing in was 14,300.

“That shows you people here weren’t just buying a ticket package to get to watch Team Canada,” Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson told Proteau. “They want to see every country play. Of course, they want Team Canada to win, but that shows you Canadians are enthralled with this tournament.”

It doesn’t matter how the WJC is promoted, as TSN vice-president and executive producer of live events Paul Graham said in the story. Fans from around the world always have good reason to tune in.

“When you mention the word ‘junior’ in Europe, Europeans automatically think second-rate,” Graham said. “That’s one of the reasons the IIHF doesn’t use the word. They call it the under-20. Whereas in Canada, we know what the word ‘junior’ means. We’re OK with it because we know it means ‘the next generation of stars.’ ”

“The opportunity to watch the games on TV and the fact that the teams have been competitive are the main reasons why the interest has grown so much,” added Uffe Bodin, editor in chief for the Swedish hockey website hockeysverige.se. “As a teenager, it became a tradition for me to stay up in the middle of the night to watch the tournament on TV when they were playing in North America. Unfortunately, that tradition was halted after a few years. It wasn’t until the world juniors came back to Sweden in 2007 that the interest came back and actually got really big.

“Suddenly, the tradition I had cherished in my teens was something that almost everyone that wasn’t interested in hockey got hooked on. Since there isn’t any big sporting event to talk of during the Christmas and New Year’s break, the WJC really comes in handy for people who like to occupy their minds with something.”

One thing is for sure – interest in the WJC isn’t about to decline. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“Every year I look at it and say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we’ve raised the bar this high,” Nicholson said. “I wonder, can we keep it this high? And then it goes even higher.”

Vol. 66, No. 13, Dec. 31, 2012

By Adam Proteau

Although the IIHF World Junior Championship has been belittled by some for being a provincial tempest in one country’s teapot, as with anything, it really depends on the way you look at it. Is the tournament as much of a seminal annual event as it is in Canada? Not even close. But that’s like saying tea isn’t all that appealing of a beverage because it’s a religion in the United Kingdom more than it is anywhere else on the planet.

When you stop comparing the WJC’s success outside Canada to the runaway success within it, you see the tournament has grown in prominence in a number of other countries. For instance, last year’s final between the eventual-champion Swedes and Russia garnered a TV audience in Sweden of 600,000 in a land of nine million people – and the game was televised at 2 a.m. local time. Three years earlier during the 2008 final in the Czech Republic, one million Swedes tuned in to watch the game between their native sons and the Canadians. 

Even in the United States, which still hasn’t embraced the tournament to any discernible degree, the opportunities to watch the planet’s best 19-years-old-or-younger players have steadily improved: the NHL Network will air 15 games of the 2013 tournament, the most ever for that country.

Canada received its first full slate of the world juniors on TV at the 1991 tournament in Saskatoon, Sask. That is when Canadians first got the chance to see all the home side’s games and began a love affair with the WJC that now borders between torrid and dangerously obsessive. Twenty-one years later at the 2012 world juniors in Calgary and Edmonton, they had an average attendance of 14,300 for games Canada wasn’t in. 

“That shows you people here weren’t just buying a ticket package to get to watch Team Canada,” says Hockey Canada president Bob Nicholson. “They want to see every country play. Of course, they want Team Canada to win, but that shows you Canadians are enthralled with this tournament.”

It definitely does. It also shows you how wrong it is to expect that reaction in every corner of the hockey world. There are specific reasons why the WJC has exploded in popularity in Canada and made the rest of the planet pale in comparison.

Of course, the first and most important ingredient is the caliber of players Canada produces and the relentlessly competitive product the country puts on the ice virtually every year. Fans and sponsorship money don’t keep pouring in year after year if they’re not getting a pleasing emotional payoff on the regular – and with 11 gold medals and six silvers dating back to Saskatoon, Canada has given its supporters exactly that.

But beyond the thrill of the game and the unforgettable moments that have become part of Canada’s hockey lexicon, there are practical reasons why the world juniors has roots so deep in the hearts of Canadians. And the biggest one is the most obvious: Canadians love junior hockey more than anyone else. Most of us who live there know the general structure of the junior system, the teams, the best players. 

Contrast that with other parts of the world where the word “junior” alone counts against the product. “When you mention the word ‘junior’ in Europe, Europeans automatically think second-rate,” says Paul Graham, V-P and executive producer of live events for Canadian sports TV channel TSN. “That’s one of the reasons the IIHF doesn’t use the word. They call it the under-20. Whereas in Canada, we know what the word ‘junior’ means. We’re OK with it because we know it means ‘the next generation of stars.’ ”

The WJC has come to represent the best of Canada’s hockey youth in much the same way the NCAA’s Div. 1 national tournament is a platform for America’s elite young basketball players. Both events are played by a slew of high-quality athletes, many of whom never amount to much in their top pro leagues, but those players still live as legends in their own right. (Think John Slaney at the world juniors and Ed O’Bannon at basketball’s Final Four.) Both are where those who follow the sport at its foundations go to watch young players mature in a compacted series of games that will mark them all their remaining days. It’s a graduation ceremony, if you will. 

“For what March Madness is to Americans, that’s a pretty fair equivalent of what this tournament is to Canadians,” says Mark Milliere, TSN’s senior vice-president, production. “It may be true even to a bigger degree in Canada. I think seven of our top 10 rated games involved Canada at the WJC. They’re really Super-Bowl-ish type numbers that you wouldn’t see in the States for March Madness.”

When you see it in such a manner – and realize few people involved with U.S. college basketball ever navel-gaze and wonder why people outside America don’t love March Madness as much as they do – you become a little less anxious about the present and future of the WJC. The time to be worried was back in 1996 at the disastrous world juniors held in Boston and spread out over six arenas with little connection to the community or close proximity to Canadian fans. The time to be nervous was a year later at the 1997 WJC in Switzerland, when attendance for some games was in the low hundreds.

Those days are gone. Lessons have been learned. When next the WJC returned to America in 2005, they were in North Dakota, nice and close to the Canadian border. Six years later, the event was held in Buffalo. And it’s no coincidence the games haven’t returned to Switzerland for 15 years. The IIHF now has a better understanding of where it can build the WJC product, which is why it has doubled down on Canada – awarding it the 2015, ’17, ’19 and ’21 tournaments – and targeted select nations beyond that.

Another element in the WJC’s runaway success in Canada is gift-wrapped by the calendar. Simply put, the Christmas season provides a captive audience and a romanticism that can’t be beat. With the exception of college football bowl season in the U.S., no tournament gets to piggyback on the shoulders of the year’s biggest and best stretch of family time the way the world juniors does. “It’s a time when Canadians are traditionally at home and certainly when all kids are home,” Milliere says. “So you end up with a good chunk of the population on a seven-day break. It certainly has fed the beast. Look, this tournament would be an elite tournament if it were played in March or September and there would be a lot of interest. But to have it in the holiday season, where people have more disposable time, there’s no question that’s played a huge role in the success we’ve seen.”

Make no mistake – TSN has played a gigantic role in the WJC’s triumph over Canadian hearts, minds and wallets. The sports network recognized the tournament’s value decades ago – initially winning the property because it was willing to televise all Canadian games – and has since worked closely with the IIHF, Hockey Canada and other countries to produce a near-perfect product. The resources TSN puts into the event are matched only by its Grey Cup coverage, but even then the imprint the Canadian Football League championship makes on the network is dwarfed by the world juniors. 

You can see WJC-related stories regularly on TSN’s SportsCentre flagship news program, on its special top 10 show and on its continual coverage of NHL prospects in general. It’s what Milliere calls a “360-degree” blueprint and it has been staggeringly successful. “It’s a year-round strategy,” Milliere says. “It involves the entire company and everyone takes a tremendous amount of pride in it. Sales-wise, it’s been a terrific success and when (the tournament has) been in North America, it’s a great opportunity to have your clients present and sharing in these moments. So it’s win-win-win.”

So why haven’t hockey-loving countries embraced the WJC as much as Canada? The answer is as much structural as it is emotional. For example, Sweden was first enthralled by the 1993 tournament held in Galve, Sweden – thanks to national team members such as Peter Forsberg, Markus Naslund, Kenny Jonsson and Niklas Sundstrom, who led the host team to a silver medal – but when the program didn’t enjoy success in the years that followed, its broadcasting opportunities slowly fell apart and it soon was completely out of sight and mind. Only when the Swedes’ fortunes began to improve around 2006 did the games come back to SVT, Sweden’s equivalent of Canada’s government-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 

And since Sweden has finished with at least a bronze medal in four of the past five tournaments, the event has become a staple. “The opportunity to watch the games on TV and the fact that the teams have been competitive are the main reasons why the interest has grown so much,” says Uffe Bodin, editor in chief for the Swedish hockey website hockeysverige.se. “For a few years after that Galve tournament, Sweden had some pretty decent teams. As a teenager, it became a tradition for me to stay up in the middle of the night to watch the tournament on TV when they were playing in North America. Unfortunately, that tradition was halted after a few years. It wasn’t until the world juniors came back to Sweden in 2007 that the interest came back and actually got really big.

“Suddenly, the tradition I had cherished in my teens was something that almost everyone that wasn’t interested in hockey got hooked on. Since there isn’t any big sporting event to talk of during the Christmas and New Year’s break, the WJC really comes in handy for people who like to occupy their minds with something.”

Simply making games available to as wide an audience as possible is a major part of the present and future battle to maintain and build interest in the world juniors. And that’s what we’re seeing: TSN’s success has resulted in more countries requesting to use their broadcast feed every year. Two exhibition games played in Russia this past August (in advance of the 2013 tournament in Ufa, Russia) were sold out. 

Even the internal expectations for the WJC are still being surpassed. “Every year I look at it and say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we’ve raised the bar this high,” Nicholson says. “I wonder, can we keep it this high? And then it goes even higher.”

The Hockey News Archive is a vault of 2,640 issues and more than 156,000 articles exclusively for subscribers, chronicling the complete history of The Hockey News from 1947 until today. Visit the archives at THN.com/archive and subscribe today at subscribe.thehockeynews.com