EDMONTON, Alberta — Minnesota Duluth’s Wyatt Kaiser and Dominic James officially made the 2022 U.S. National Junior Team for the second time Sunday as “Take 2” of the 2022 IIHF World Junior Championships gets underway Tuesday.
Kaiser, a defenseman heading into his junior season with the Bulldogs in 2022-23, and James, a sophomore center, were part of the original U.S. National Junior Team that competed briefly in the first take of the World Juniors last winter in Red Deer, Alberta. That version of the tournament was canceled after just four days due to a COVID-19 outbreak among multiple teams and officials.
The IIHF is attempting to play the tournament again starting this week in Edmonton as an entirely new tournament — the reset button has been hit and the results from the winter have been erased.
The United States opens preliminary round play at 9 p.m. Tuesday against Germany before taking on Switzerland at 9 p.m. Thursday, Austria at 1 p.m. Saturday and Sweden at 9 p.m. Sunday.
Quarterfinals get underway Aug. 17 with the semifinals Aug. 19 and medal games Aug. 20. All games are at Rogers Place, the home of the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers.
ADVERTISEMENT
The U.S. split a pair of pre-tournament games against Finland and Switzerland over the weekend. James scored in the 6-1 win over the Swiss on Saturday after being denied on a shorthanded breakaway Friday in the 5-2 loss to Finland.
Bulldog Bites
- Bulldogs recruit Ty Hanson, a defenseman out of Hermantown, and the U.S. Under-18 Men’s Select Team finished fifth at the 2022 Hlinka Gretzky Cup in Red Deer following a 4-2 win over Slovakia. Hanson didn’t register a point in the tournament.
The UMD women’s hockey team released its full 2022-23 schedule late last week , adding four nonconference games in New York to the previously reported and advertised nonconference home series against Harvard.
The Bulldogs will open the season Sept. 24-25 against Long Island University, a member of the upstart New England Women’s Hockey Alliance that plays at the New York Islanders training facility in East Meadow, New York. After that, UMD heads upstate to play two games on the St. Lawrence campus in Canton against St. Lawrence on Sept. 29 and Penn State on Sept. 30.