Montreal Canadiens First Round Picks Not Going To Summer World Juniors

The Montreal Canadiens has three players at the 2022 World Junior Championships, but it was shut down after they played a pair of games. The rescheduled event is going to take place this August in Edmonton, but who is going to take part?

Kaiden Guhle was the captain for Team Canada, Oliver Kapanen was on Finland and Jan Mysak was suiting up for, and captaining, the Czechia squad. Will they be back to play in the rescheduled summer event?

We will have to wait and see, but a couple of high profile Habs prospects that we thought would be playing, are not. First round picks Juraj Slafkovsky and Filip Mesar were on Slovakia’s roster at the tournament in December, but they surprisingly were not included on the lineup for next month’s event.

Both players are gearing up for their first seasons in North America in all likelihood and it appears the Canadiens just don’t want them to start that season on August 9th. It would be a high intensity tournament, in Canada, with a lot of eyes on both players and it would run until August 20th.

That would only leave a couple of weeks before the Canadiens rookie camp begins, and then main training camp, and then an 82 game NHL season or a full AHL season for both. It would just be too much to ask Slafkovsky to play hockey for nine straight months after being the first overall pick. The chances of him running out of gas shortly after Christmas would be incredibly high.

It has already been announced that Mysak will play, and it makes sense that Kapanen will be on Finland’s team since he was on the initial team and invited to the evaluation camp for the summer team.

But what about Guhle? The same reasons Slafkovsky would sit out this event would apply to Guhle as well. He is about to set out on his first pro season and will need to pace himself over a long season. Starting it in August as the captain of Canada’s World Junior team would only make it more likely the big, physical defender would be run down long before the end of the NHL schedule.

If Slafkovsky and Mesar are sitting it out to prepare for pro seasons, Guhle likely will too.

However, this could open a door for other Habs prospects. If someone like Mason McTavish or Cole Perfetti are not going to play for Canada, Joshua Roy would be a logical addition to the roster.

Lane Hutson is an incredibly skilled defenceman from the United States who could steal a spot on their blue line after initially being left off their roster a few months ago. Blake Biondi is also on the summer evaluation camp for USA.

Vinzenz Rohrer, a third round pick of the Canadiens last week, played for Austria in December and will surely be back for them in August. Petteri Nurmi played for Finland at the canceled event and was a 7th round pick of the Canadiens this month as well.

When the dust settles on the 2022 World Juniors, it looks like it will be a missed opportunity for Guhle, Slafkovsky and Mesar. But we could still see Mysak, Kapanen, Nurmi, Rohrer and possibly Hutson or Biondi at the tournament in August.

It will be worth keeping an eye on the final roster announcements over the next couple weeks as the teams prepare for the first ever summer World Juniors.

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