Last week's great news that the NHL will allow its players to compete for their home countries at Sochi 2014 (Winter Olympics) took on a local angle this afternoon as five current Bruins along with head coach Claude Julien and GM Peter Chiarelli could all be involved in the proceedings.
Olympic hockey is the best and obviously we'll all be rooting for Team USA but as a heads up, three Bruins (Patrice Bergeron, Milan Lucic and Brad Marchand) were among the 47 players that Canada will have at its orientation camp August 25-28 at Calgary in August. From that group, 23 players will make the Olympic team. Of those three, only Bergeron has played in the Olympics (sparingly in 2010 with the gold medal team). Lucic went to their tryout camp in Vancouver that time around but didn't make it and Marchand has never played for Team Canada at this level.
Bergeron has the best chance to make it out of the Bruins from Canada although I wouldn't be shocked to see Lucic or Marchand also playing in Russia this February depending on the type of player they are looking for. There will be some familiar faces around the team with Julien named an associate coach (under Detroit's Mike Babcock) and Chiarelli on the management team.
Besides the U.S. and Canada, the other teams to name their camp rosters today included Sweden, Russia and Finland. For our purposes, Sweden and Finland are the ones to keep a close eye on. The newest Bruin Loui Eriksson is on Sweden while Tuukka Rask was named for Finland.
For what it's worth, neither Tyler Seguin not Jarome Iginla were named by Canada although that could change with injuries between now and February.
Tweet
Follow @RichSlate
No comments:
Post a Comment