The IIHF World Junior Championship starts this morning in Malmö, Sweden. Here's what you need to know. Be sure to follow Yahoo Sports' junior hockey blog Buzzing The Net for all the results, breaking news and oddities.

1) The hosts are a juggernaut

Being on your home turf in just about any competition is going to help guarantee success, but it's difficult to say that Sweden's going to need it.

This is a deep and menacing team, with quality at every position, as has become the wont of the Swedes in the last several years in particular. They're coming off gold and silver in 2012 and 2013, respectively, and will certainly be looking for more with 13 kids on the roster taken in the first three rounds of entry drafts past, and three more who are going to be draft-eligible for the first time this summer.

Washington Capitals 2013 first-rounder Andre Burakovsky recently made headlines (much like Seth Jones did last year in correctly proclaiming the U.S. the best team in the tournament a week before it started) by saying that the Swedes didn't particularly feel as though Canada was any great threat to them.

“I know what Canada brings and if I look at what they have and what we have … I think I can say that we have a better team on paper,” Burakovsky told Swedish newspaper Skanskan. “Then we'll see how they play and how it goes for us.”

This was “used as motivation” by the Canadian players he slighted — including his Erie Otters teammate Adam Pelech — and that motivation led to, you guessed it, a 3-0 ritual sacrifice of the allegedly-vaunted Canadians in a pretournament exhibition. Burakovsky had two points in the contest.

The Swedes also pushed around the U.S., 4-2, in their pretournament game. So no, this is not a Tre Kronor group that is especially interested in joking around out there. They are, by any reasonable estimation, the favorite.

2) Russia's goaltending is going to be very good (again)

A thing you can typically set your watch to in international play is that Russia is going to try to score a million goals because their goaltending is typically hot garbage.

That is not going to be the case again this year. Even as the hopes that Russia's netminders in the NHL will offer reasonable options on home ice for Sochi continue to fade, predictably, there is the matter of Andrei Vasilievsky, a 2012 Tampa Bay Lightning first-round pick who's been outstanding in the KHL this season, under the circumstances.

His .923 save percentage in 19 games for Ufa isn't in the top-20 in the KHL (given that there are too many NHL washouts with .930-somethings in front of him) but for a 19-year-old, he's held in extremely high regard by the Russian Federation. How highly? Bob McKenzie said on the radio earlier this week that he's the clear starter for the junior team, and might end up winning the Sochi job as well.

Now might be a good time to remind everyone that Semyon Varlamov has a .925 save percentage in the NHL this season, and that might speak to both a lack of trust in that number and an overestimation of the quality of the KHL (where Curtis Sanford is second in the league in save percentage).

However, nonetheless indicates that Vasilievsky is looking to improve on his already-strong performance (1.81 GAA, .950 save percentage) in last year's tournament on home ice, though he split time with Andrei Makarov. Now the crease is his and his alone.

One suspects that if Russia is playing for a medal at the end of this tournament, which seems likely, the final result won't be a 6-5 win this time around.

3) A few NHLers will be playing

The above-mentioned teams will have their chances bolstered by the fact that NHL teams have deigned to loan some semi-legitimate NHL players to their junior teams. Others, meanwhile, have left their nations wanting for better players, and this is the kind of thing we hear about every year when Canada inevitably loses: “All our best players are in the NHL!” Sweden and Russia will have no such excuses.

Specifically, Sweden received the decadent holiday gifts of Elias Lindholm from the Carolina Hurricanes and Filip Forsberg from the Nashville Predators, while Russia unwrapped its very own Mikhail Grigorenko, who is 46 years old, from the Buffalo Sabres

Lindholm has 13 points in 27 games between the AHL and NHL this season, and put up nine points in 12 games in all U20 competition for Sweden last season. One assumes he's going to put up a lot more this time around. Forsberg, meanwhile, has 13 points in 18 AHL or NHL games so far this year, including 3-5-8 in six with Milwaukee, and would probably be doing better were he not coming off a concussion.

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