IIHF World Championships: Day Seven Open Thread

We're a week into action at the IIHF World Championships, with teams wrapping up their fourth of seven games in the preliminary round today. What have we learned thus far?

The host nations of Finland and Sweden are doing their part... they're both undefeated and could both be leading their groups as a result so far. Traditional powers Russia and Canada are right there with them, and after that, it's a bit of a free for all. Despite this, the crowds are remaining dismal for the early games, but hopefully the final weekend and the quarterfinals will see more sellouts.

Kazakhstan looks to be on the road to relegation while in the Stockholm group, right now last place is occupied by Denmark, but there is a ways to go for that to change. Latvia and the Czech Republic play today with a quarterfinal berth possibly at stake, while the Americans, Slovaks, and Swiss are in a tight battle for the final two spots in the quarterfinals in the Helsinki pool. Here are today's games:

Unfortunately, the IIHF has stopped streaming the games live on YouTube, and the streams will now air on a 30 minute delay. This experiment is running into issues with the countries that have exclusive broadcast rights awarded and is ridiculously unfortunate... I can't imagine why anyone would want to watch it on YouTube if they had access to the game on their TV at the time. Hopefully in future tournaments these issues are resolved and live streaming becomes normal for those of us that want to watch as many games as possible, particularly the ones that aren't being broadcast by the rights holders.

Join us for updates of the action as it happens, even if we can't catch it on YouTube live.