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Hey remember a few years ago when they had the Olympics in Sochi, and USA Hockey produced a pretty underwhelming team?

You know what I mean: When the brain trust left some of the best players at their positions in the whole world home because of things like a perceived lack of hustle or because they had bad dreams and really only wanted to beat Canada? That team ended up not even winning a medal, and in fact humiliated itself in the bronze medal game with a performance so shameful the people who make these decisions were lucky to keep their jobs.

Or maybe you remember how just a few months ago, when they had the World Cup in Canada, and USA Hockey produced a pretty underwhelming team?

They did this thing where they left some of the best players at their positions in the whole world home because of things like perceived lack of hustle or because they didn’t think being an elite NHL player would translate to a short tournament and, more specifically, beating Canada. That team was, in fact, so bad that the US didn’t even make the medal round and actually lost all three games in regulation. Only Finland did worse.

And while these are short tournaments, so anything can happen, these are the kinds of results that anyone with a brain spent a month before both saying, “Here’s what’s going to happen.” It’s not hard to figure out that if you’re playing best-on-best tournaments, it stands to reason that you should always aim to bring your, I don’t know, best players.

This isn’t advanced nerd-thinking of which long-time Hockey Guys are incapable. It’s a simple concept. And yet …

This week, USA Hockey announced two cuts for its World Junior roster. One of which saw Senators prospect Logan Brown, the No. 11 pick in June’s draft, sent packing. It was a bit of a puzzler but not a huge one; while Brown is immensely talented (he’s currently 11th in the OHL in points per game), he is also coming off an injury suffered in early November. The tournament would have been his first games since then, and Bob McKenzie reported that Brown was seen as having been rusty and potentially wasn’t keeping up with the pace his coaches wanted.

So really, it’s a tough bounce for Brown, but you get the rationale.

Then there’s the Alex DeBrincat. If for some reason you ever needed a perfect distillation of everything wrong with the way Hockey Guys think about this sport, the decision to leave Alex DeBrincat off a World Junior team — which he already made last year — should be Exhibits A-Y (Exhibit Z will be the beautiful Stanley Cup champion Phil Kessel, who is the nicest boy alive).

DeBrincat is everything Hockey Guys are skeptical of even now, after years of what should have been learning. He’s third in the OHL in points per game (2.14) after finishing 13th and seventh in the past two seasons. The first time he broke 100 points in the OHL, in his draft-year-minus-1, that could have been written off as a product of playing with Connor McDavid. Fair enough. But then he did it again in his draft year sans McDavid, forming a lethal one-two punch with Dylan Strome instead. And hey, Strome’s another with a high-end talent level, so maybe you write that off too.

And it seems like a lot of teams did, because it’s tough to think of too many guys who score 200 OHL points across their age-17 and age-18 seasons. Seems quite rare, in fact. But DeBrincat did it and was rewarded for his efforts by dropping into the mid-second round in June.

The probable guesses as to why have little to do with production, and everything to do with some rather tangible intangibles. DeBrincat is listed as 5-foot-7 and 170 pounds. And unlike, say Johnny Gaudreau whose skating and speed are superlative, DeBrincat doesn’t get around at an elite level. So the feeling is that he’s a guy who’s going to score in junior, but it might not translate to the pros. Adding in the fact that he played pretty much his entire OHL career next to high-level talents, and you can see where teams rationalize the decision to drop him down the draft board.

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