Canadiens’ Slafkovsky Projected To Make Team World Roster

The NHL has announced a new format for the All-Star Game this season; it will be a mini-tournament featuring five teams: Team Canada, Team USA, Team Finland, Team Sweden and Team World, which will allow players who are not from one of the four countries to get an opportunity to play. It's hardly surprising to see the NHL try to rejuvenate the ASG formula, which had become stale and in which players didn't really want to partake anymore.

By appealing to the players' national pride, the NHL is capitalizing on the nationalism that seems to be all the rage right now, especially with several American players attempting to be traded to American teams. The league has released projected rosters for the five teams, and one Montreal Canadiens player makes the cut for Team World, but it may not be the one you thought it would.

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Each team will consist of 11 players: nine skaters and two goalies. The NHL and NHL Players' Association will select 30 players from each of the participating teams—Canada, Finland, Sweden, the United States, and the World team—and fans will vote to determine which will open in December. From that list, fans will have the opportunity to select eight players from each team. The remaining three roster spots for each team -- one forward, one defenseman, and one goalie -- will be selected jointly by the league and the players' association.

In its article about Team World, NHL.com had editor-in-chief Bill Price, senior director of editorial Shawn P. Roarke and senior writer Dan Rosen predict which 11 players will make the cut for Team World. In net, they went for Andrei Vasilevskiy and Igor Shesterkin. As for the skaters, they selected Alexander Ovechkin, Nikita Kucherov, Leon Draisaitl, Nico Hischier, Kirill Kaprisov, Martin Necas, Artemi Panarin, David Pastrnak and Juraj Slafkovsky.

I'm not entirely certain that Slafkovsky would fare better in a public vote than Russian sophomore Ivan Demidov, who's a bit more spectacular as a player than the power forward and therefore better suited to an ASG type of event. That being said, Slafkovsky has always done well when performing for Slovakia on the international scene, so it would make sense to include him in the vote.

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