Ironslave
Registered User
- May 22, 2008
- 530
- 1
Wrong. It's his age. Despite other countries having selected their 18-19 year old rookies to their teams, the biggest reason is not because he's not good enough, but because there are too many players from Canada that have seniority and long-standing pedigree of experience in Stanley Cup playoffs, international play, etc. For Canada, no matter how good an 18 year old is, even if he was scoring 30 goals right now, he'd still not get picked. There is no question that some players have been picked now and in the past purely based on "history" and not current performance.
As I said, he has more goals than a lot of those other players in the running, and he's a better + rating (by a long shot), helped turned the Avs around from being last place in the West last year to 4th-5th place this year. It's a case of where if two players are of similar stats and talent, you go with the guy with experienced veteran over the rookie, plain and simple. It is no knock to him "not being good enough". You'll all eat your words in the next olympics when he gets the call. Bottomline is, Canada is STACKED and is the hardest team to make. If you're 18, even if you are gretzky, they are not going to pick you. You just don't pick an 18 year old while you still have a whole slew of seasoned allstar veterans to choose from.
Canada doesn't pick many 18-19 year olds because players they have depth of mature, elite players, while most teens are still maturingm especially in their all around game, and not yet at their peak.
and actually, I won't eat my words next Olympics, MacKinnon likely will be ready by then as he keeps improving on his impressive skills, but he's just not ready now. Nobody thinks MacKinnon is in the running now, and there's a reason for that. Even Tyler Seguin, who plays a similar game, is barely mentioned. Bringing up MacKinnon for this team makes no sense.