Players I thought had good tournaments, or at least did what the could given their role:
Björnfot
Niederbach
Raymond
Nybeck
Söderblom
A couple of others did okay and about a dozen players were underwhelming.
Agreed, the majority of the players on the team had a weak tournament.
Outside of a couple of short spells, ten minutes against Finland, a short stretch against the Czech, a PP fuelled period against Russia, the team never found any type of rythm or cohesive team play. And the only stretch where they played with any kind of intensity was those ten minutes against Finland.
When so many players perform badly you have to look at the coaches and management. Rönnmark felt like a deer in headlights tbh and was put in tough situation. Was probably unfortunate they weren't allowed to bring in Alfie and his brother, while inexperienced as coaches at this level Alfie at least has some authority.
Swedish U20 teams tend to perform at their best when they play a pro style in these tournaments, when they utilize the fact that most of the players are regulars on SHL or Allsvenskan teams and play a similar structured game. But the last couple of WJCs they've played a much more junior style of play with guys playing much more based on their individual skill, much less focus on team play, not nearly as aggressive in the neutral and defensive zone.
The SHL is almost unwatchable some games because there’s such a major focus on skating hard, checking through all zones, structured play, making the simple play at all times and so on. And I sure don't want them to fully adopt the SHL style, there should be way more room for skill plays and creativity, but you'd like to see some of that structure, team play and constant skating translate to the U20 team. This year it felt like they were completely disjointed both defensively and offensively and I don't think they ever brought their skating legs to Canada. Or maybe the skating legs are still in quarantine.
Offense was just based on individual efforts and you rarely saw any of that cycling game which is often a strength for swedish teams just a lot of one and done shots. The first PP lineup was a brilliant example of how all offense was based on individual performance, it just felt like five guys doing their specific skill on the PP, never five guys connecting and moving as a unit.
Overall just a poor performance and I hope swedish hockey goes back to the drawing table a bit.
As far as individual players I think it's difficult to rate them due to the team as a whole being such a mess. But of the high end guys I was a bit concerned that Söderström looked so slow, his skating looks good technically but he gets beaten in races all the time, that's not a great sign for a prospect, that he has work to do defensively wasn't surprising but that lack of speed was a surprise to me. Also Holtz looking as bad as he did, he looked a step behind the play the whole time, not from lack of skating speed but just seemed slow to react. And less agile than I remember from last year, has he been injured? I can't recall if he missed any time in the SHL the last while. Both issues could be from him putting too much pressure on himself, he didn't seem like a guy in the right head spade this tournament. Had a similar feeling with Broberg, hard to tell how much of that was him being frustrated with his injury though, I think he really wanted to show well in his future home rink, as the captain and in his third and final WJC, to then be injured and not able to use your main skill must be frustrating as hell.
