MILAN – As the Canadian men’s Olympic hockey team arrived at Santagiulia Arena about an hour before they stepped on the ice for their first practice Sunday, as the players entered the locker room, they saw their line assignments for the first time.
Macklin Celebrini is 19, playing his second NHL season. Tom Wilson hoped all season to simply make Team Canada. Neither of them were on this team at the 4 Nations Face-Off a year ago.
And when they looked at that board in the room, Celebrini and Wilson were wingers on Canada’s top line, flanking Connor McDavid, the best player in the world.
In many ways, the composition of that line says a lot about how head coach Jon Cooper and his staff organized Canada’s forwards for this first practice, which began roughly eight hours after they touched down in Italy on Sunday morning.
Though the Team Canada management group put a lot of stock in how players performed at the 4 Nations, it is telling that Cooper took two players who didn’t play in that tournament and put them on his first line. He made a cold evaluation of his group and chose the two players he felt would complement McDavid the best.
McDavid plays with Zack Hyman on the Edmonton Oilers, a dogged forechecker who works the walls and the front of the net so McDavid can work his magic.
Enter Wilson.
“That’s obviously, I think, the hope: someone that can go in and forecheck some pucks back and be good along the wall and get to the net and bang a few home,” McDavid said. “That’s what he does really well.”
Cooper thinks Wilson does that more than “really well.”
“Listen, everybody needs an F1,” Cooper said, referring to the lead forechecking forward. “And that big boy there is one of the best I’ve seen, I’ll be honest.”
Wilson was put on this team, and on that line, to play a specific role. And he understands that perfectly well.
“Connor’s one of those guys, you get him the puck, and he makes a lot of stuff happen,” he said. “It’s obviously a quick sample size, but get the puck in their hands and good things will happen.”
As for Celebrini, the youngest player on the team, his skill and cerebral 200-foot game should, in theory, mesh well with McDavid. Because, as Cooper explained, he is objectively one of the best players in the world right now, even if he is 19.
Brayden Point likely would have been on this line playing the wing with McDavid, as he was in the 4 Nations championship game, had he not been forced to pull out of the Olympics with a knee injury. Point is a veteran of nearly 700 NHL games who was a complementary skill element on that line.
He is seemingly being replaced by a player who barely has to shave.
“Listen, he may be 19 years old, like his physical body is, but his acumen for the game is not,” Cooper said. “He’s wise beyond his years. And so I can’t sit here and look at him as this kid. I’ve been with him. I was with him at (the World Championships) and followed his path closely. And speaking of the players, this kid is wise being beyond his years.
“Now, this is the first practice on the first day of the tournament, but if he’s shown anything and all of us in this NHL year, he’s a pretty special player. And I don’t do any award voting and stuff like that, but there sure seems to be a lot of people on your side of the fence there saying this kid might be up for some big-time awards. So take his age out. He’s a hell of a hockey player.”
Everyone on Team Canada is a hell of a hockey player, and Cooper will have several decisions to make as things evolve over the next two weeks. But what is clear from how Cooper started things off is that he is favoring balance up front, with McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon and Sidney Crosby centering the top three lines. Teams with a designated checking line will lose sleep deciding which line to deploy it against.
And the reason for that balance up front can be summarized with one word: pace. To maintain the pace necessary to win this tournament, minutes and energy will need to be meticulously managed.
“The pace and speed of the game at 4 Nations — I’m telling you, if a player plays 23 minutes in the NHL game, that’s akin to playing 16 at 4 Nations. The pace was so high. You need all four lines. This isn’t one where, hey, listen, we’re going to play our top two lines and roll with it. You can’t do that here. If I think the pace is going to be anything like what it was at 4 Nations, and I’m pretty darn sure it’s going to be that and then some, then you need everybody going. So for me, the balance, all these players are the best of the best. So to me, we’ve got four elite lines.”
Facing Canada will be a grind, and that is another byproduct of the decision Cooper made to play Celebrini and Wilson with McDavid. That allows Mitch Marner and Mark Stone to play with Sidney Crosby, for Brad Marchand and Nick Suzuki to flank Nathan MacKinnon, and leaves Cooper with a fourth line of Brandon Hagel, Bo Horvat and Sam Reinhart, which is objectively elite.
But any combination of those 12 forwards — not to mention Sam Bennett and Seth Jarvis, who appeared to be extras at practice — would be elite.
Elite is the bar at this tournament. It is the coaching staff capable of taking all the elite talent on his roster and clearing that bar the highest that will get the edge. And the way to clear that bar is finding the right combinations, the best complementary skill sets, the best chemistry mix.
Canada’s coaching staff has spent weeks coming up with these combinations. They were debated, they were stress-tested, and this is where they landed.
And the conclusion based on this first taste of what they came up with: Canada will come at you in waves. They will grind you down with pace and skill. Good luck keeping up with that.