Interesting article from Lucas Aykroyd at IIHF.com about International Hockey becoming more competitive at the junior level and the influence that a cancelled season would have on the 2013 World Junior Championships.

It might seem like the race for gold at the 2013 IIHF Ice Hockey U20 World Championship is as wide open as it’s ever been.

Look at the list of the last four winners, which features no back-to-back titles: Canada (2009), the United States (2010), Russia (2011), and Sweden (2012).

In the tournament’s history, dating back to 1977, we’ve only seen one other sequence of champions like this: Canada (1997), Finland (1998), Russia (1999), and the Czech Republic (2000).

Recently, however, the Canadians, Russians, Swedes, and Americans have separated themselves from the rest of the U20 competition. (In fact, not one medal has been awarded to a nation outside that foursome since Finland’s bronze medal in 2006, which came largely courtesy of the heroics of starting netminder Tuukka Rask in Vancouver.)

But are the Big Four truly neck-and-neck heading into the 2013 showdown in Ufa, Russia? That’s a difficult question. The answer is probably no.

Certainly, Canadian fans, who take the World Juniors more seriously than their counterparts in any other country, are agonizing over their team’s inability to bring home the expected top prize. Especially since Canada has lost in such heartbreaking fashion in elimination games the last three years.

There was John Carlson’s OT goal that gave the Americans a 6-5 gold medal victory in Saskatoon 2010. Then came the stunning five-goal, third-period rally by the Russians to beat Canada 5-3 in the 2011 final in Buffalo. And memories of surrendering a 6-1 lead to Russia in last year’s semi-finals and falling short with a four-goal comeback in the third are still fresh and painful.

Yet even when you acknowledge a pattern of Canadian goaltending woes in these must-win matches, it’s pretty obvious that Hockey Canada’s program has not fallen apart. Not by a long shot.

The Canadians, after all, made the final every year from 2002 to 2011. That’s a record of consistency that no other U20 nation can rival.

Historically, most NHL clubs either refrain from releasing their top U20 talent to appear in the World Juniors or only do it if they’re struggling in the NHL. However, if the league is not in action, then Canada, which already enjoys the deepest program, will have even more talent to choose from.

In 1995, Canada earned a perfect 7-0 record en route to gold under coach Don Hay in Alberta, benefiting from the presence of NHL-ready skaters like Jason Allison, Bryan McCabe, and Eric Daze. 2005 witnessed what was arguably the most dominant squad in World Junior history, as Sidney Crosby, Corey Perry, and Ryan Getzlaf helped power Canada to another spotless golden run.

Of course, other countries could also take advantage of the availability of NHL-ready sprospects this time, like Russia with Nail Yakupov and Mikhail Grigorenko.

But it’s only scraping the surface of possibilities for the Canadians to point out that they could potentially dress a player who has already competed in a senior IIHF World Championship (2012), former Calder Trophy candidate Ryan Nugent-Hopkins of the Edmonton Oilers.