Czechia was missing a key player for its opening game of the World Junior Hockey Championship against Canada.<\/p>\n
Star defenceman Radim Mrtka<\/a> was not in the team’s lineup for what ended up as a 7-5 loss. Mrtka was not initially registered on the official roster because of a health concern, the team said Friday.<\/p>\n Czechia coach Patrik Augusta said that Mrtka will play at some point during the tournament.<\/p>\n The 18-year-old was picked ninth overall by the Buffalo Sabres in this year’s NHL Draft.<\/p>\n Mrtka has one goal and 15 assists in 14 games for the Seattle Thunderbirds this season, his second year with the WHL squad. <\/p>\n The six-foot-six Mrtka started the season with the AHL’s Rochester Americans, registering one assist in four games.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Czechia was missing a key player for its opening game of the World Junior Hockey Championship against Canada.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-374357","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}