Joel Armia
At first glance, Joel Armia’s performance at the 2013 World Juniors looks incredible. He played six games for Finland at that year’s event and scored six goals and six assists to finish second in scoring behind Ryan Nugent-Hopkins who had already played an NHL season and would have been playing in the NHL if not for a lockout that was still going on.
However, a closer look at Armia’s numbers show he had a great tournament, but he didn’t exactly light it up against top competition.
Finland started the tournament with a 5-1 win over Latvia and Armia had a pair of assists. He was shutout in a 3-1 loss to Czech Republic. Armia then had an assist in a 5-4 shootout win against Switzerland. He completed the preliminary round with a pair of goals against Sweden in a 7-4 loss for Finland.
This dropped his team’s record to 2-2-0 and then finished fourth in their division which pushed them into the relegation round. Armia had two goals and three assists in those four games, which is solid production but nothing spectacular.
Armia then went to the relegation round where Finland won both of its games by a combined score of 19-4. He scored four goals and three assists for seven points in those two games which helped Finland finish 7th in the ten team tournament. He did help them avoid an embarrassing relegation, but piling up points against the two of the weakest teams in the tournament isn’t exactly the same as scoring big goals in the medal round.