Oh, momma don’t you cry, we are exactly 2 weeks out from the start of the 2022 World Junior Championships and USA Hockey has announced their preliminary roster. Back on November 30th, Chris Peters released the camp roster and I blogged about the Hawks 4 prospects that are on there. I’m not going to jump into the full roster until we’re a little bit closer to the games because you never know who could be lost to injury. Here is one example of that:
Thomas Bordeleau is not on this roster.
He was on this original roster but his name is noteibly absent from the one released a few hours ago. No need to scream in USA Hockey’s replies about how stupid they are for dropping him, he’s most likely injured. Bordeleau is a phenomenal player. He’s been playing up at the University of Michigan this season but he hasn’t played a game since December 4th against Minnesota. I put on my Sherlock Holmes hat for this one because I really wanted Bordeleau on this roster too. So I’m looking back at tweets from Michigan, feverishly googling his name looking for a clip, blurb, anything but no one has officially announced an injury. Bordeleau racked in an assist in the first period during that December 4th game, I don’t see anything else from him after that (Big10 apparently doesn’t track its player’s TOI) but then in his post-game interview, Michigan’s Head Coach Mel Pearson was talking about having a “Next man up” mentality. Hockey Player Speak for “we’ve got some injured players, we’re not going to dwell on it so we don’t shit the bed. Next question.”
Bordeleau is listed as a “Non-dresser” in both of Michigan’s Game Day rosters against Ohio State that went down this past weekend (Friday the 10th and Saturday the 11th), but so is Eric Ciccolini, who we know is out with injury. So far this season, Bordeleau had played in 18 games, he had 19 points (6G 13A) and was +16. USA Hockey would have to be boneheads to drop him from this roster for anyone else. I feel horrible that he’s missing out on this World Juniors too. He was dead-set to play in last year’s when he got removed from the roster after having a “close COVID contact”. It really sucks that he’s not going to be there, all of his teammates were rooting for him.
So don’t get too pissy with USA Hockey, I’m sure we all would have fucking loved to see him out there but the universe can just be flat-out cruel. His teammates Luke Hughes, Jacob Truscott, Matty Beniers, and Mackie Samoskevich will be headed to represent the US of A. Owen Power and Kent Johnson headed up north a few weeks ago to play for their home country of Canada.
Like I said, once we’re closer to the pre-tournament games on December 20th and 22nd, I’ll get deep into this USA roster and give you the scoop. For now, I’m going to pour one out for Thomas Bordeleau, that kid really deserved to win the gold with his USA Team this year.
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