Dave Cameron:
We’ve had a lot of discussions regarding Dave. He is a steady coach with a long track record. I consider him one of those UBER SAFE coaches. You cannot point at Dave Cameron as a coach and suggest that he is a bad coach. He’s not. No matter what happened at the WJHC with Team Canada, you cannot point at his career and define it based on one Tournament when he recently won a Gold Medal with Team Canada a few years ago. He has a Gold and Silver as Head Coach with a 5th place finish this past tournament. There will always be those, ”what have you done for me lately” types that will crawl out and point but overall, Dave Cameron has had a pretty solid Coaching Career.
The question is whether that career is trending toward being over or not. He is 66 years old. He will enter next year as a 67 year old Major Junior Coach with zero prospects of being back in the NHL. There is nothing left for him to prove. He will be coaching a rebuilding team. IT will likely take at least three more seasons before the 67’s will be in the Contender category again. He will be 70.
The question really is whether his heart is in it anymore and whether the 67’s organization wants to run out another cycle with Dave as the Head Coach. Additionally, James Boyd is married to his decisions. If James Boyd has aspirations of moving up from the OHL ranks into pro hockey and eventually the NHL, does he want to hitch his wagon to an aging coach that is perceived as being behind the times?
Norm Milley has served a long tenure with the 67’s. By all accounts he is a capable Major Junior coach that will get an opportunity to be a Head coach in this league sooner or later. He had a great OHL career as a player scoring 50 goals twice and followed that up with a long minor pro career. When organizations invest a lot of time developing coaches, you don’t want them to move on to other franchises. At some point you need to elevate them when they prove capable. If the enter another cycle with Dave, it likely means Norm will not be there at the end of that cycle. When Dave is done, there will be no coaches that have tenure in the organization to carry on any tradition/culture. That is not a great situation to be in. We’d likely need to replace Dave and the entire coaching staff in 3-4 years.
I think the time has come for the 67’s organization to show some maturity and not simply fall into the safety net of keeping this Boyd/Cameron combo together because they could not be bothered to do the work to ensure this is the right path. I think they need to sit back and do a proper analysis on the organization and really put forth an effort at choosing their path going forward. This decision regarding the GM and coach is important because the team really is at a crossroads. Multiple players requesting to leave is concerning. That needs to be addressed by Senior Management. If they are unable to sign any of the NCAA bound players they have drafted while the rest of the league continues to add them, that also needs to be addressed.
I think there are a lot of leading indicators out there now to properly make a decision.
Your last four paragraphs are certainly indisputable and I'd like nothing more than for the 67s to turn the page on the Cameron era, but the immediate point I was originally trying to make is whether a 16/17-year teenager, presumably a high-first round draft pick, that is asked by his GM to waive his NMC for a trade to Ottawa will look at the 67s with Dave Cameron at the helm and say "yes, that is a place I'm willing to go to". This is only speculation, but I think there is a massive issue there. And I don't think Cameron's long and reasonably solid coaching career really matters in this case.
We've talked at length about the players wanting out of Ottawa over the past few seasons, both rumoured and actualized, for a variety of reasons. I don't think we need to rehash any of that, but the long and short of it is that it's not a good look.
16/17-year olds will look at Henry Mews and see a dynamic young player that was at one time viewed as a 1st round draft prospect, falling all the way to the 3rd round and now (apparently) getting offers to go to the NCAA.
Cameron failed to adapt his game-plan or (imho) properly utilize Pavel Mintyukov, now an NHL regular (after Boyd spent a boatload of draft picks acquiring him), during his time in Ottawa in a winnable playoff series against Peterborough in 2023.
The World Junior team was completely shambolic. I don't know how much input Cameron had on the team construction, but presumably he had some degree of input on who was invited to camp and ultimately selected to the team, and presumably he provided significant input into the process of the style of game he wanted to play and the type of player he wanted to do it with.
The top-6/bottom-6 roster construction style doesn't work. It hasn't worked since the 1990s when Canada had a significant size and skill advantage over every other country besides the Soviets/Russians, and the Swedes and Americans (sometimes, but not every year). The tournament is won and lost now based on overwhelming skill and talent and being able to form chemistry over a short period. Canada needed OT to win gold a few years with a team stocked full of NHL contributors like Bedard, Wright, Stankoven, Guenther, and Clarke!
1. The selection process has been discussed to death, but leaving Misa, Yakemchuk, Sennecke, Lardis, Greentree, Parekh, Cristall, etc, etc. either at home or cutting them from camp was completely out of touch with the way the tournament is played now. Bring them in, and give them a look at camp at the very least!
2. Too many redundant players were selected who didn't really offer anything different or unique - Howe, Gauthier, Cataford at F...Mynio, Price, Akey on D. All similar players with no standout traits (though I thought Price ended up looking pretty good).
3. Unwillingness or inability to enforce team discipline. Most coaches would sit Pinelli's ass for a period or even a game as a result of some really mindless penalties in the U.S. Accountability, responsibility. It just wasn't there. Players probably felt like they could do anything. Just using Pinelli as an example. Cowan and Rehkhopf also took some really dumb penalties in that game.
4. Tactically, Canada played a dump-and-chase style of game with a fairly passive forecheck as far as I could tell. Win a board battle, kick it back to the high man or d-man for a perimeter shot with no traffic in front. A few problems: (1) aside from Beaudoin, Canada didn't really have any crashers and bangers that could actually win board battles; I thought that was the job of Howe, Cataford and Gauthier, but they were all ineffective. Where is the size and ability to play and mean game and win board battles? (2) that style of play isn't really appealing, nor is it successful in winning hockey games...particularly when you have little size in the forward group and your best shooters were left at home or sitting in the pressbox
5. As a result of the poor roster selection, players like Ritchie, Nadeau and Cowan were playing a line higher in the lineup than they probably should have. Ritchie was fine, but him and Cowan were a poor fit together (and Cowan was a very poor fit on PP1) and Cameron never separated them. Cowan led the forwards in ice time despite being largely ineffective and making poor decisions with the puck (and taking a really stupid penalty vs. the U.S.). Not so say Cowan shouldn't have made the team...but middle-6 RW would have been a better fit for him.
6. The Canadian team apparently didn't practice after Dec 27th, which is completely outrageous, particularly considering the team showing no chemistry or ability to generate offense consistently aside from 1-on-1 rushes or the odd Catton/McKenna play. Passes not hitting the tape, not knowing where your linemate is or going to, passes in front or behind linemates...all symptomatic of poor chemistry that needs to get developed on the ice at practice.
7. Cameron formed some honestly really dumb line combo's and special teams units. The PK was bad, a hallmark of recent Cameron-coached teams. Bonk at PP QB was stupid, as Bonk doesn't QB London's PP...so why would Cameron think he could QB a PP at the international level? Even Bonk himself was questioning it. Not trying Rekhopf with Martone, or Martone with McKenna. I would say that Martone played a fairly passive game early in the tournament and sat in the pressbox as a result, but why wasn't he given a look with Rehkopf earlier in the pre-tournament games? Why didn't Rekhopf dress towards the end of the tournament when he's one of our best shooters and really the only forward consistently getting in hard on the forecheck and hitting people?
8. Despite Catton-McKenna-Pinelli generating the most chances offensively, in general, Cameron played them as a 3rd line for most of the tournament (in terms of minutes) and had Catton/McKenna on the 2nd PP unit. McKenna moved up to the Ritchie line mid-way through the Czech game, but as usual with Cameron it was too little, too late.
George saved Canada's ass from an even worse and more embarrassing outcome. I've watched this tournament most years since 1991, and I can count on one hand the number of teams as bad or worse than this year's. 1992, 1998 (when they infamously lost to Kazakhstan), 2013 (4th in a lockout year with everyone available), and 2016 (when they got pumped by Finland in the QF).
Cameron just doesn't have the coaching chops to win a tournament like this and it was laid bare for all to see last week. He dropped the ball in 2011, failing to adapt in the 3rd period when Russia stormed back and won the gold medal game after being down 3-0. Yes, he won gold in 2022, but that was with a loaded team even he couldn't f*** up with McTavish, Bedard, Zellweger, Johnson, etc. and even then he needed a miraculous play by McTavish on the goal line to save the game and then an OT goal by Johnson.
So yeah, if I'm a 16/17-year old first rounder, and being asked to waive a NMC to come to this mess under Cameron with it being so fresh in the mind, it'd be a big "nope" from me.
