Lines needs a change:
13 F & 7 D against Hungary
Rantanen - Suomela - Armia
Hartikainen - Manninen - Kapanen
Kakko - Sallinen - Merelä
Oksanen - Björninen - Pesonen
Anttila
Lehtonen - Ohtamaa
Määttä - Matinpalo
Koivisto - Pokka
Seppälä
Heljanko
Larmi
Lammikko, Friman, Olkinuora (healthy scratch)
Heljanko a starter. Tappara bias, come on
. I don't know if our starter should be Larmi or Olkinuora. Larmi sometimes overplays situations, but sometimes he makes some really good saves. Also I'm not convinced about Larmi in shootouts. Larmi has never proved himself in the NT in a game of death type situation and that worries me. He's just proven himself in the SHL finals. That's probably the most pressure he's ever faced in hockey matches so far during his career. If I have to guess Larmi is probably considered to be a lock as our starter by our coaching staff still.
As you, I'd be open about going with 7 D-men. Going with 13 forwards could be more useful so we could have forward line changes inside games. Merelä could be interesting case being dressed as a 13th forward and then having his chance inside a game if Jalonen feels like trying that. Also if we aren't sure about Suomela being healthy, 13th forward could be useful for that reason as well.
Why 7 defenders? Because it feels like there's something wrong with the defenders. Well it is the lack of good puck movers, but let Jalonen indentify the weakest link of the defenders and sideline that player. I wonder if it was a mistake to leave Saarijärvi out of this team? Leaving Kemiläinen out was the right move though, as he surprisingly looked very bad in the practice matches. Maybe Kemiläinen's belly got full after the Liiga championship or so. So maybe he was mentally on summer vacation already.
SantosHalper has a pretty nice lines there and it could electrify many lines or it could make things really messy as well. I think that there's higher chance that it would make things little bit better, but changing the lines now and testing them vs weaker countries is very risky. We don't get real data, such that would be guaranteed to work vs top countries. We could get a QF exit when we get a reality check against a top country in the QF game. It might be better to just trust that the lines will deliver later and trust the process and do minimal changes.
For the above reasons I doubt that Jalonen makes too big changes with the forward lines. One change could indeed be having Suomela back in after his lingering small injury. Suomela said in an interview yesterday that he's had this same issue bothering him during SHL season as well. I think it was in MTV3's morning broadcast's Tulosruutu program. Suomela also said something like he will be playing soon. To me it sounded like a very confident answer where he didn't even question about his spot in the line up. I think that Jalonen will insert Suomela back in as soon as Suomela gives green light. It would be easy to have him return now when the lines could use some tweaking. It would also be nice if our PP2 unit would have a center.
Anyways, back to the point. The max amount of changes I see Jalonen doing with the forward lines would be to bring Suomela back in and swapping one winger with another winger inside the lines and that's the absolute max I see Jalonen doing. I think that Jalonen will do less changes than that, so very minimal changes. Most likely Hartikainen-Manninen-Rantanen stays untouched. Changing this line would most likely mean that the PP1 would have to be changed as well, so I don't see Jalonen doing that, because it would be throwing out chemistry creation out of the window. Jalonen most likely believes in the building process of that chemistry creation and that chemistry delivering results in the games that matter. I think that max change for PP1 unit is 1 player going out and 1 player in, but it's most likely 0 changes to that unit.
