Landon DuPont flashed his offensive skill to help Canada grab a win at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup.<\/p>\n
DuPont opened the scoring and added an assist as Canada beat Slovakia 7-1 to improve to 2-0 in Edmonton.<\/p>\n
Kayden Stroeder scored twice for Canada, while Ryerson Edgar, Liam Pue and Alexis Joseph had a goal and assist each.<\/p>\n
Leif Oaten wasn\u2019t busy in Canada\u2019s net but made 12 saves for the win. Canada fired 48 shots at Slovakia’s goaltender Nicko Zakk Havel.<\/p>\n
DuPont, who is projected to go No. 1 in the 2027 NHL Draft, scored a power-play goal just over two minutes into the start of the first period. Slovakia quickly tied it up, but Warren scored 19 seconds after that on a nifty move in front to put Canada up for good.<\/p>\n
Stroeder\u2019s first goal came halfway through the second period, on the power play, to put Canada up 3-1. Edgar, Stroeder and Pue then padded the lead with goals in the third. Joseph capped Canada’s scoring with 16 seconds to play in the third period when his pass on a two-on-one deflected into the net.<\/p>\n
The win comes after Canada defeated Switzerland 7-3 on Monday.<\/p>\n
The Swiss shook up the table on Tuesday, though, with a 7-6 win over Sweden. The winner came with just two seconds to play in regulation and put Sweden in real trouble heading into the final day of round-robin play.<\/p>\n
Sweden, which also dropped a point by needing overtime to beat Slovakia on Monday, will miss the playoffs unless they can beat Canada on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
In the other group, the United States faced Finland while Czechia defeated Germany 8-3.<\/p>\n
The Hlinka Gretzky Cup is an annual under-18 tournament hosted by Hockey Canada, the Czech Ice Hockey Association, and the Slovak Ice Hockey Federation. While it is not a formal IIHF event, it is one of the first opportunities for the next generation of hockey stars to represent Canada in an international competition.<\/p>\n
Following Wednesday\u2019s final round-robin games, the semifinals will take place Friday and the medal games will be played Saturday. The United States are the defending gold-medalists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Landon DuPont flashed his offensive skill to help Canada grab a win at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup. DuPont…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":846527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,44],"class_list":["post-846526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/846527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}