In his second installment, Duchene talks about what Team Canada has learned about itself after splitting two pretournament games against Team USA and how it feels to play in front of Canadian fans.

Colorado Avalanche forward Matt Duchene is playing for Team Canada at the World Cup of Hockey 2016. The 25-year-old has agreed to keep a diary throughout the tournament, which begins in Toronto on Sept. 17 and runs through Oct. 1.

OTTAWA - Two games into the World Cup of Hockey 2016 and I think one thing that has become very clear to us is we're a very talented team. We've got a bit of everything; guys who can play all roles: shooters, passers, shot blockers, great goaltending. We have to try and get better and better and try to push ourselves. We were better Saturday than we were Friday and that's been our thing, get better every day.

I don't want to give too much away, but we had some areas we wanted to clean up a little bit from last night. We felt we lost that game in the last seven minutes of the first period. We outplayed Team USA badly in the start of the game and then they came on really hard at the end of that period and found two nice goals, two gritty goals. That's the type of team they are, they're going to grind you down and play really hard. Our finish around the net was a lot better Saturday and that started us off on a good note.

Video: USA@CAN: Duchene finishes off Seguin's perfect pass

I don't think there was much carryover from the physicality of the first game, we didn't really talk about that as a team. If we had a chance to finish a guy who gave us a cheap shot the night before, we did it, but we wanted to keep it clean. We wanted to stay out of the scrums, and you could tell from the number of penalties that the referees weren't going to let what happened Friday happen again. They called it close, there were a lot of power plays and fortunately we won the special teams battle.

It was great to play with Jumbo (Joe Thornton) and Segy (Tyler Seguin) on Saturday, I thought we had some good chemistry together. Segy made a great play on our line's goal and hopefully we can continue to contribute and build more chemistry if we stay together through the tournament.

It was important for us to get that split in this back-to-back against a rival like the United States. We're a prideful group and so are they. Even in pretournament if you play a team back to back, you're going to play for keeps and try to make sure you win both. Friday we did everything in our power to win that game, it just didn't happen. You tip your hat to them, adjust what you need to adjust and Saturday we came back and played in front of our fans.

Which was amazing.

They gave us a lot of energy, it was really fun to play this game in Ottawa. I've never played with a Team Canada jersey on home ice before, at least not since I played for Team Ontario in the Under-17 Championship.

It was very exciting for me tonight, and it makes me that much more excited for the tournament to start in Toronto on Sept. 17.