Tavares added a secondary assist to his tournament tally, sitting with one goal and eight assists through seven games played.
Tavares added a secondary assist to his tournament tally, sitting with one goal and eight assists through seven games played.
John Tavares and Canada have punched their ticket to the semifinals on Saturday at the Men’s World Hockey Championship after a dominant 6-3 victory over Slovakia in the tournament’s first quarterfinal matchup.
Helping to secure the team's spot in the semifinals on Saturday, the Toronto Maple Leafs captain fed Bowen Byram at the point for a shot that had traffic, before Pierre-Luc Dubois cleaned up the rebound to put Canada in front 2-0 just under two minutes after Jared McCann opened the scoring.
Canada emerged as the leader in the Group ‘A’ standings from their 5-2-0-0 record in the preliminary round, drawing them a comfortable matchup with Slovakia, who finished in fourth place, the final advancement spot, with a record of 3-1-1-2 in Group ‘B’.
On Thursday, Canada controlled the pace of play from start to finish, at one point leading 5-1 less than halfway into the final frame. The Canadians outshot their opponents 43-21 in the game, still without a loss through eight games of action at the tournament.
Tavares, now with nine points in seven games played (1G, 8A), sits second only behind Dylan Cozens (8G, 2A) for the leader in points on the Canadian team. From a team standpoint, Canada ranks second in scoring efficiency with the eighth-ranked power play percentage – capitalizing on 6/27 opportunities (22.22% success rate) with the man advantage.
An area Canada will look to clean up heading into the semifinal is their penalty kill unit which is currently ranked 11th of 16 teams in the tournament. After surrendering their sixth goal in the tournament when being down a man on Thursday to Marek Hrivik of Slovakia, Canada has now allowed six goals on 27 penalties for a 77.78% rating.
Canada will play in the semifinal at either 8:20 a.m. ET or 12:20 p.m. ET on Saturday as they await their next opponent.
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