Saturday was National Women's Hockey Day in Canada, a couple of months after the IIHF declared World Girls' Hockey Day for October 2. The women's game doesn't get much, if any, coverage outside the Olympics game, but with a major mandate to grow the game significantly leading up to the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, I figure its good to check in on the game at various levels in the meantime.

The Canadian Women's Hockey League is the top circuit of women's hockey in the world, with six teams total, five in Canada and one in Boston. The league has been lobbying in recent years for support from the NHL, to perhaps become a WNHL type circuit. The five Canadian teams are based in Montreal, Toronto, Burlington, Brampton, and an Alberta based team that plays games throughout the province, primarily out of Edmonton and Calgary. The league merged with the former 3 team Western Women's Hockey League this past year, which had teams in Calgary, Edmonton, and Minnesota. The Minnesota Whitecaps, the 2010 Clarkson Cup Champions (the top club championship in women's hockey), still exist, though they currently only play exhibition games mainly against NCAA teams.

One of the unique features of the CWHL is that the teams based in Montreal, Toronto, and Boston wear the colours of the NHL's Canadiens, Maple Leafs, and Bruins. Part of that is a hope to be eventually sponsored by those NHL clubs, as well as appeal to the fan bases in those cities. The Alberta team kind of has adopted the Edmonton Oilers' colours as opposed to the Calgary Flames, for whatever that's worth. I had heard they were trying to recruit European players to play in the CWHL this year, but it appears only two are actually in the league this year: Finnish forward Annina Rajahuhta plays for Burlington, while Austrian goaltender Nina Geyer plays for Brampton. The rest of the league is made up of Canadian and American players, with most playing close to home (Quebec born players for Montreal, American players for Boston, etc.).

Melissa Boufounos, herself a one time CWHL player, did a report on her blog Habsolutely Wonderful about Brampton's 7-2 win over Toronto yesterday. The game featured famous international players Gillian Apps, Molly Engstrom, Sami Jo Small, Jayna Hefford and Tessa Bonhomme, fresh off her victory on CBC's popular show Battle of the Blades.

After the jump, some women's hockey news from Europe and some roster news for the upcoming Men's U20 World Junior Championship.

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There really isn't a lot to say about the Final:  another back and forth power struggle between the two elite nations of women's hockey, ending in overtime with a near delayed penalty empty net own goal against the Americans, before Hilary Knight ended it the proper way for Team USA:

BTW, if anyone has a video of Jenny Potter's 2-1 goal for the USA, it'd be great if you could post it in a FanShot.

The Americans are back on top of the international hockey world.  The World Championships are roughly equal to the Olympics in terms of roster quality, although this first WC after the Olympics is a bit of an early test of the program's true strength.  Younger players, recent retirements, players deciding to start families all comes into play at this point.  While the Americans may have won their third straight World Championship, not winning the Olympic gold is still looming over the program for the time being. 

Hilary Knight's reputation, however, could not be higher after this tournament.  She dominated the tournament in terms of scoring, and capped it off with the winning goal.  Canadian legend Hayley Wickenheiser was a -3 on the night in contrast, so there's reason to legitimately believe the Americans are moving ahead of the Canadians in terms of women's hockey supremacy.  The USA now holds the #1 spot in the IIHF World Ranking, and can take solace in the fact that in these best on best competitions, their only blemish in the past four years has been a loss on Canadian soil.  On the Americans' home ice and neutral ice, Team USA reigns supreme. 

But this tournament was about more than the North American power struggle.  We're seeing that in at least one position, the Europeans are starting to match their more powerful rivals across the sea.  The MVP of the tournament was Slovakian goaltender Zuzana Tomcikova, who may be staking claim to being the top women's hockey player in the world.  However, she didn't even win the top goaltender honours as seen by the IIHF Directorate, who chose the equally compelling Noora Raty of Finland for the prize.  For the competitive balance of the sport, at least the European countries are learning to stop the skilled Canadian and American women's shots...  now it's all about putting the pressure on their goalies by generating a lot more chances of their own.

Coupled with the improved play of the European nations is the decline of the Asian teams.  It used to be common to see all of China, Japan and Kazakhstan at these tournaments, but next year it will be six European teams at the World Championships with no Asian representatives.  Kazakhstan's relegation to Division 1, coupled with Japan's withdrawl this year due to the natural disasters, and China's stunning relegation from the Division 1 level may all be part of the evolution of the sport:  the nations with greater hockey infrastructure and more access to higher competition levels may be a sign of the future.  And for Russia, pushing Finland to overtime in the bronze medal game, it's an encouraging start to the four year cycle that concludes in Sochi in 2014.

The season is over for now.  Next year, they'll all be back at it again in the NCAA, CWHL, and various other domestic leagues that house the best women's players on the planet.  Here's a look at the final standings for the entire World Championships, which saw 34 nations compete at varying levels, including three brand new participants:

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The IIHF Women's World Championships wraps up today in Zürich, Switzerland, with the medal games.  We're used to seeing the same nations duke it out for the medals at the top women's tournaments, so seeing Russia instead of Sweden in the bronze medal game is a bit of a nice change.  However, they'll be in tough to knock off Finland, who have been getting exceptional goaltending from Noora Raty to date.  In the gold medal game, we see Canada and the USA face off for bragging rights once again.  Canada has outscored their opponents 25-1 in their four games so far (Switzerland, Slovakia, Finland twice), while the Americans hold a 32-3 differential over their four opponents to date (Kazakhstan, Sweden, Russia twice). 

American women have dominated the scoring race so far, with Hillary Knight and Brianna Decker at 12 and 11 points each to lead the pack.  Four more of their teammates are included in the top 10 in scoring, which is a contrast to Canada:  Rebecca Johnston and the ageless Hayley Wickenheiser lead Canada with just three goals and five points each.  In general, it's been a low-scoring tournament:  all the starting goaltenders so far have had save percentages above 90%, including the ones for the bottom teams, who have faced an amazing amount of shots. Clearly, the goaltenders have been the real story of this tournament.

Stick around here for updates on the action.  TSN will broadcast the Final, I'm not sure if anyone will be carrying the bronze medal game.

Bronze Medal Game:  Finland   (2-0-1-2) vs. Russia   (1-1-0-3), 4:00 PM local, 10:00 AM EST

Finland is becoming the dominant European nation in women's hockey, and should be heavy favourites in this game.  It's only Russia's second time in a medal game at a women's championship, and a win would be the country's first ever medal in the discipline.  Russia is under the microscope to improve their program leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, and this team is just seen as the starting point for where the country wants to end up after it all.  Despite playing here, they did start the tournament losing to Sweden and the USA by a combined 20-2 score, and it took overtime for them to knock off Switzerland in the quarterfinals.  But hey, it's a start.  Their performance so far has already guaranteed them a move up to 5th overall in the Women's World Ranking, and a win would put them incredibly close to a tie with Sweden for 4th.

Gold Medal Game:  Canada   (4-0-0-0) vs. USA   (4-0-0-0), 8:00 PM local, 2:00 PM EST

To no one's surprise, the two North American nations continued their dominance over the rest of the world and will play their only truly competitive game against each other in the final.  However, Canada had trouble solving Finnish goalie Noora Raty, and the USA went from beating Russia 13-1 in the round robin to 5-1 in the semifinal, so at least the European goalies are figuring out the elite North American shooters.  The winner of this game will take over first spot on the IIHF World Ranking, which is actually currently a tie (Canada gets first in lieu of winning Olympic gold last year).

Covering international women's hockey tournaments hasn't been the most fulfilling experience in recent years, but it looks like the current IIHF World Women's Hockey Championships are at least providing a mild breath of fresh air to the established pecking order.  In Winterthur and Zürich, the host Swiss team are trying to play for a medal at the tournament, something they've only done once before, when they finished 4th in 2008.  The rigid groupings of international women's hockey generally sees the Americans and Canadians battle for top spot, with Finland and Sweden always being a step ahead of the other European nations to battle almost exclusively for bronze.  The Swiss finished 5th at last year's Olympics, so they're the obvious next in line, but upsets in women's hockey are few and far between.

Luckily, we got a minor one this time.  After a typical blowout loss to Canada (12-0), the Swiss played a much more controlled game against Finland, the 2010 Olympic bronze medallists.  Despite a strong start, they found themselves down 1-0 after the first, and in the second the Finns attacked relentlessly, but could not solve Florence Schelling, Switzerland's 22 year old goalie that plays in the NCAA for Northeastern University.  A late power play goal by Nicole Bullo tied it up, and the teams played a fairly wide open, but scoreless third period.  In the second minute of overtime, the 2117 spectators went home happy thanks to Stefanie Marty (Syracuse, NCAA).  The rest of Group B went according to plan:  Kazakhstan lost all their games, Canada won all of theirs (though they only beat Finnish goalie Noora Raty once on 49 shots for a 2-0 win), and so the OT win by Switzerland will have them finish second in the group. 

That means they will play the winner of today's Russia-Slovakia game in the quarterfinal, with the winner advancing to likely play the USA in the semis.  Finland looks like they'll play Sweden in the quarterfinal rather than for the bronze medal, giving someone new a shot at some hardware for a change.

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There are some positives in the women's hockey world to speak of this year, as three countries made their IIHF debut last week in the Women's World Championships Division 5 tournament.  It's the first ever time the WWC format has been extended to six different tournaments, now matching the amount of IIHF run senior men's tournaments (although with less teams participating).  

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this tournament was the simple fact that none of the participants had ever won a game at an IIHF World Championship or Olympic Qualifying tournament before.  Turkey had participated in two previous Division IV tournaments (2007, 2008) and lost every game in both years.  Bulgaria infamously made their international debut by being allowed to participate at the lowest Olympic Qualifying tournament, which was essentially a Division II level tournament.  They scored only one goal in that tournament and gave up an embarassing 192, including an 82-0 thrashing at the hands of eventual Olympic participant Slovakia.  So in all the tournaments that the teams had participated in, they had only received the minimum amount of points the IIHF were handing out for their World Ranking.  

Usually, in a tournament like this, there will be one team that goes without a win in the tournament, so unfortunately not everyone can now boast of an international win, but it did seem important to add this level of participation.  If the levels are kept to five teams, the costs of hosting a tournament (an issue in the past) are kept to a minimum and the possibility of blowouts is similarly reduced.  But this year, the possibility for blowouts was very real, as none of the teams had played each other in international competition before.  

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Ah, women's hockey.  The beleaguered half of the international hockey world, without a top professional league and facing the brunt end of all the problems of the game in Europe in general.  Women's hockey's growth in North America is well documented, and while there are still issues in getting ice time throughout the continent, the participation rates keep climbing and the sport has a visible presence thanks to the elite athletes like Hayley Wickenheiser and Angela Ruggiero. 

Looming over the sport is the stagnant growth of the sport in Europe and Asia.  The 1998 Olympics, which saw the introduction of the discipline for the first time, are well in the past, and the initial boost it gave nations like Japan and China have largely faded.  In Europe, the challenges of building new arenas have allowed national federations in hockey nations to ignore the women's game:  if there's barely enough ice time for the boys, they aren't interested in getting girls involved. 

So while the 2011 Women's World Championship program will feature the World Championship debut of four new nations with the addition of a fifth division, no one is making measured progress towards challenging the North American lock on the sport at the top. 

But, it's another year, and maybe we'll see some players emerge from Europe and Asia that make us think there's progress being made.  While only fourteen nations participate in the Women's Worlds U18 tournaments, thirty-seven will participate in the senior tournament.  The sport needs to make noticeable gains in the coming three years, or unfairly, it could see its status as an Olympic event revoked.

Here's a calendar for the six tournaments:

2011 IIHF Women's World Championship Calendar

Level	Host	Dates	Participants
Division 3	Newcastle, AUS	Feb. 1-6
Division 5	Sofia, BUL	March 14-19
Division 4	Reykjavik, ISL	March 27-April 1
Division 2	Caen, FRA	April 4-10
Division 1	Ravensburg, GER	April 11-17
Championship	Zürich/Winterthur, SUI	April 15-24

As you can see, the Division 3 tournament has already taken place, as for some inexplicable reason the IIHF held a hockey tournament in Australia in early February.  I can't imagine how much of a challenge that had to have been, though I'm sure the athletes loved the sun.  The Division 5 tournament is ongoing right now in Bulgaria, who made their international debut in the 2010 Olympic qualifiers in late 2009, making headlines for the wrong reasons. 

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The IIHF U20 World Junior Hockey Championships might be all I've talked about for the past couple of weeks (with a little dash of the Spengler Cup thrown in), and while it's understandable, I do want to provide a bit of insight into the other tournaments going on, particularly a relatively new official IIHF tournament going on in Stockholm right now.  

Women's hockey gets absolutely zero coverage outside of a brief mention once a year with the World Championships, and of course the Olympics, where everyone complains about the lack of competition.  So I think it's important to look into the World Women's U18 Championships, or the WW18s for short.  I have yet to do anything comprehensive like do a ranking of the junior hockey women's programs of the world, but now with this in its fourth year I think it might be time to start taking notice.  I'm no expert at this, I'll admit, but here's to a good old college try.

The Canadians and Americans are still the class of this event, so much so that both teams ended up perfect in their group with a goal differential of +21 for Canada and +27 for the USA in only three games.  Their scores were lopsided enough so that even the second place teams in each group ended up with negative goal differential. 

For the other teams, the games against each other are more important as a result.  Winning bronze is kind of like a mini-gold medal.  Sweden and Germany finished second in their groups, and drew the third place teams in the other groups, Finland and the Czech Republic respectively.  The third place teams ended up winning out in the quarterfinals, so on Friday we'll be seeing Canada take on Finland and the Americans taking on the Czechs.  Sweden will play Germany in the fifth place game as well, and there will be the second relegation round game between Switzerland and Japan.  Relegation is done through a best of 3 series, and the Swiss won the first game 4-0, so another Swiss win will allow them to stay with the top group this year.  Switzerland was the team that won the Division 1 tournament in 2010.

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It's tough to sometimes follow the logic of the IIHF, and it's view of what's best for growing the game.  They have legitimate concerns on one front about the continued viability of club hockey in Europe, and how the CHL's Import Draft hurts each federation's ability to develop their own stars.  When I say this, what I'm getting at is that the incentive for each club to invest in the development of players aged 15-17 is pretty minimal if they lose the players for ages 18-20 to the CHL.  And when they come back, they may not return to the same club.  I've discussed this before, it's been discussed recently, and I don't intend on revisiting too many of the main points regarding it.  My main opinion on the draft is that it works best for smaller nations, but it's helped decimate the Czech/Slovak ranks, which were ripe for the picking and need significant capital invested into them to ensure long term viability (new rinks, taking the older generation and making them coaches and even investors, etc.).

What doesn't jive with the IIHF's argument here is their plan to grow the game for women's hockey in Europe.  What they want is for North American clubs to be more open to taking on national team players from European countries to help expose them to a higher level of play.  Is this not exactly what the CHL Import Draft can provide for junior players from lesser nations?  And furthermore, is this not passing the buck from the European federations, who have done little to promote the women's game at home (outside of Finland, and to a lesser degree Sweden and Switzerland)? 

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