Report: IIHF eyes summer 2022 for cancelled World Juniors

In case you missed the news earlier today, the 2022 World Junior Championships has been cancelled.

What an absolute preventable shame. The fact of the matter is that this entire tournament was so poorly handled by the IIHF and they were forced to cancel things due to their incompetence and lack of foresight and planning. Honestly, I feel so badly for all of the young men who travelled away from their families for absolutely NOTHING. And that's saying nothing about the guys who tested positive and are now stuck in quarantine for 10 days... enjoy your New Year's boys...

So... what next?

In their explanation of what exactly transpired today, multiple TSN analysts put forth the idea of rescheduling the tournament during the 2022 Winter Olympics or for sometime in June or July, 2022. More to come on that.

"It's not impossible to reschedule the tournament," said TSN analyst Craig Button. "But there are huge obstacles in the way of it."

"The perfect outcome would be to hold the World Juniors during the Women's U-18 tournament," said James Duthie. "It makes sense, James but... there's NHL development camps, there's lots going on in the hockey world at that time," responded Button. "Yes, we know the schedule can be tight but that window is there because there's less stress on other leagues. It seems that that might be the very best time for player availability."

IIHF President Luc Tardiff stopped short of promising that the cancelled tournament will be played later in 2022, but did say that the IIHF will do as much as possible to hold the tournament, likely in June, July or August 2022.

In all honesty though, this was an entirely predictable outcome and if the IIHF wasn't prepared to "push through" a rash of positive test cases, then the entire tournament should have been held in a bubble like it was in 2020/2021. You may recall that last year the tournament ran without a hitch while the players quarantined themselves in hotels, restaurants and Edmonton's Rogers Place.

This year the IIHF elected to open things back up a bit and... well here we are. Again, entirely predictable. If the IIHF wasn't prepared to deal with a number of positive test cases then they either should have run this entire tournament in a bubble or they should have outright cancelled or postponed it. It's clear to me that there was a ridiculous lack of foresight and now the IIHF is scrambling to get things under control... in the end it's hockey fans who pay the ultimate price. So tired of this...