IIHF Women’s World Championship: 2022 Preview, Storylines, Gold-Medal Odds, and Forecast

I spend volunteer hours covering High School sports in the autumn, and it’s strange that it’s one of my least sports-savvy friends who came up with the perfect reason why. I was telling her about the painted autumn leaves on grass gridirons, the sloppy marching bands that somehow sound just fine from a distant parking lot, and the we-did-it-our-way branding of prep teams like the Piggott Mohawks. She said, “Wow. That’s pure. That just sounds really pure.”

Purity is in short supply in professional sports these days, but it’s not time to make the ancient Amateur > Pro argument. Golf’s ongoing firestorm has shown that pro athletes en masse can be doggedly “purist” and loyal to the traditions of a for-profit brand. IIHF nerds can tell you that the NHL’s club teams exert an almost intractable emotional pull on their pro-sports-obsessed pals whenever a Women’s World Championship or another international tourney occurs as the entire National Hockey League is active. (If the PHF tried to play club hockey games right through the Winter Olympics, as the NHL does, then we would all have 1 friend who swore that the Buffalo Beauts’ latest score was more important than a gold-medal game played on the same night. It’s those logos, I tell you.) The idea that for-profit sport is for “purists” and amateur/international games are for “weirdos” is so upside down that only pond-shinny culture could have coined it.

Moreover, it’s now apparent that NHL money, NHL bosses, and NHL front-office agendas have sacrificed IIHF men’s hockey to the altar of club competition, sending spare-part goalies to play for Team Canada and Team USA in the annual Worlds while withholding top draft picks from the World Juniors. Czechia’s 4-2 victory over the United States in the medal round of this summer’s U20 men’s tournament will underscore that trend. The quality of international rosters – especially North American rosters – is being slowly chewed to bits by the 8-figure-commodity status of elite NHL skaters.

Soccer continues to be heralded as the sport that does international games better, but the Summer Olympics and various other time-honored football events have started going through the same syndrome as a result of huge money.

Women’s hockey – that’s where the purity is. Perhaps you don’t think ice hockey can be truly pure without body-checking, but I’ll trade a few of Zdeno Chara’s assassinations for a dose of 100% optimal roster quality and tactics.

Perhaps it’s a shame that women skaters wind up practically living for the Olympics and the IIHF Women’s World Championship, and not also an equally prestigious club crown. But the Beauts and other women’s hockey brands have a LOT of room to grow before team captains would come to be treated as fragile heirlooms, encouraged not to play for gold.

It’s more likely the popularity of women’s international shinny, which dwarfed Men’s Ice Hockey and the NHL’s TV ratings alike in winter of 2022, will lead to endorsement deals and opportunities that keep star athletes motivated for decades-on-end to try to become hockey’s Alex Morgan. Indeed, among the reasons women’s IIHF teams are kicking men’s tails in ratings is because the distaff teams are so loyal to the cause as to be fully recognizable every time they step on the ice.

The long-delayed 2022 IIHF Women’s Worlds finally face-off this Thursday, August 25th, giving frustrated United States hockey fans another chance to see what happens when the Maple Leaf and the Red, White, and Blue each try their hardest in an event. But as is often the case, the first key to speculating on the tournament does not involve the top 2 nations, but rather a close look at whether anyone else can touch them.

2022 Women’s Worlds: Gold Medal Contenders and Sportsbook Odds

London and Las Vegas typically give Team Canada and Team USA slightly longer than 1-to-1 odds to win a Women’s World Championship, with the distaff division’s other teams drawing just a few casino-chips as it were. This time, that syndrome is even more exaggerated at the betting board, with the online consensus giving the defending Olympic champion Canada (-150) gold-medal favorite’s odds next to (+110) or essentially “sportsbook standard” odds on the United States women’s team to earn gold in Denmark in 2 weeks.

Why does the elite IIHF women’s level appear to be getting even more top-heavy as time goes by? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not because other nations aren’t developing teams that can compete with the Yanks and Habs. Finland just about paid-off some of those long-shot bets on WWC underdogs when the Lionesses scored to defeat Team USA in overtime of the 2019 Women’s World Championship gold-medal game, whereupon a controversial ruling disallowed the goal, letting the United States team earn its most improbable gold-medals in dozens of years of women’s shinny, and leaving “victorious” bettors to pay out-of-pocket for rounds of drinks they had ordered minutes before. But in 2022, a pair of fateful circumstances is likely “paying” for Team USA and Team Canada’s easy-breezy rides to a climactic final-day battle yet again.

For starters, talented Team Russia is out of the 2022 event, suspended due to Russia’s ongoing military incursion into Ukraine. Russia’s “Women’s Hockey League” has arguably become the 2nd-most prolific wellspring of women’s IIHF talent, or tied-for-2nd with the NCAA behind North America’s pro leagues. But the Pink Machine won’t be playing in Group A (or Group B) this summer, and maybe not next spring, leaving out many of the top names from a league that features the Finnish GK Noora Räty of Kunlun Red Star.

As for Räty herself, the world’s best women’s hockey goaltender is sitting out yet another international tournament. Paradoxically, Noora’s recent social media updates indicate that she is far more pleased with the present direction of Team Finland following a decade in which most of Suomi’s NHL stars – and Räty – were slowly alienated from their national teams. It’s to the immense credit of Finnish skaters and goaltenders that Finland has been able to rack-up so many medals as players simultaneously deal with gutted IIHF rosters, and countless episodes of drama from upstairs. But the most-crucial player on either the Women’s or Men’s lineups is taking a wait-and-see approach for now. Perhaps we’ve seen the last of Noora Räty in a Finland uniform, or maybe we haven’t, but in either case the Lionesses will be hard-pressed to replace her.

From a tournament-path POV it’s the same old story for Finland, and fellow Group A underdogs Japan and Switzerland. Fail to upset either North American team in the top-level round robin, and either have to play and win an extra playoff game, or at the very least, be tasked with defeating and eliminating both Canada and the USA, in whichever order, to earn a surprise 1st-place finish It’s a terrifyingly fraught path to gold-medal success, though the WWC’s bronze-medal chase is often an intense affair.

In fact, Finland’s (+1400) gold-medal odds may be a little too pricey of a handicap for Lionesses this time around. Potential starting goaltender Meeri Räisänen is a fascinating player indeed, a veteran who just signed a North American pro contract after multiple seasons back-stopping Men’s U20 teams in Finland. Räisänen has posted 90%+ save percentages against college-aged men snipers, totally busting the myth that decorated distaff players would “lose to the Junior Varsity” or “get beat by a men’s Beer League team.” But she also fared poorly at the recent Olympic Games, and only appeared twice for Finland in the 2021 World Championships, inviting the angle that Finland will ride with Swedish pro Anni Keisala or NCAA standout Jenna Silvonen.

Goaltending is also at the heart of a new dynamic in the USA-Canada rivalry, and led to a surprise coup on the pond in Beijing, as the Maple Leaf is once again vying for world supremacy in women’s pond shinny.

Has Canada Backstopped Its Way Back on Top?

WagerBop will cop to making a dead-wrong pick on February’s medal round in China, having speculated that finding the American women at “+” odds was too good and too rare of an opportunity to pass-up. Olympic hockey handicappers had a rather sharp angle in mind, though, gauging in advance that GKs Maddie Rooney, Alex Cavallini and the USA goaltending effort as a whole wouldn’t quite stand up to a new generation of Canadian netminding, which had to-date occasionally labored in the footsteps of legendary goaltender Shannon Szabados. It was a bold “consensus” prediction, considering the years of United States dominance prior to Team Canada’s watershed World Championship win from 2021. It was also 100% correct.

Team USA out-shot Canada as astounding 53 to 27 in Beijing’s round-robin meeting, but Canadian goalie Ann-Renée Desbiens outplayed Rooney and the Yanks lost 4-2. The gold-medal game was an even worse turn between the pipes for the Americans, as a soft goal-against Cavallini doomed Team USA to a mid-game 2 goal deficit. U.S. superstars Hilary Knight and Amanda Kessel led a too-little-too-late rally to make the final score a respectable 3-2 for the victorious Habs, but the pair – along with United States speedster Kendall Coyne-Schofield – was otherwise held without a goal by Desbiens in the event’s 2 pivotal clashes.

Brianna Decker’s severe injury no doubt hurt the Americans’ scoring punch in the Olympic medal round, but the subpar performances from Rooney and Cavallini had the former favorites fighting an uphill battle. Coyne looked like that “token” fast kid on an underdog municipal youth team, who has themselves a merry time skating around but can never quite get teed-up to score the key goal and inspire a rally. However, if you imagine the USA-Canada games from February as goaltenders’ duels instead of the loosey-goosey outcomes they were, it’s obvious how the swift, dangerous Coyne would have better impacted a tighter scenario.

Meanwhile, the Maple Leaf keeps rolling along, heartened by back-to-back triumphs over the Red, White, and Blue, and fronted by a revitalized Marie-Philip Poulin, arguably the world’s most accomplished non-contact hockey sniper at age 31. But at some point, goaltending between the 2 talent-rich rivals will even itself out again, and the deeper American depth chart will have an opportunity to take command in the feud.

Expecting things to get right back to “normal” without the United States women first working through a crisis of confidence on the blue line? That would be overly optimistic for the Stars & Stripes.

The Yanks’ present goaltending problems could even come into play on the first betting market available for Thursday’s opening face-offs in Denmark…even if Team USA manages a shut-out over Japan.

WWC Single-Game Predictions and Gambling Trends

Smile Japan remains a badly underrated, if badly undersized hockey club. The good news is “badly undersized” isn’t a great disadvantage for an IIHF division in which hitting is illegal, a factor which helped lead to WagerBop’s best money-line pick of the women’s Olympic round-robin, as Japan upset a burly, experienced Team Sweden. Smile Japan’s goals scored against the United States should have demonstrated that the upstart Asian program has improved its sniping ability, which erases the chief weakness that Japanese national-team hockey (of all genders) has suffered from over the decades.

But the bookmakers of international shinny haven’t noticed, even as Japan emerges in Group A among the 5 well-publicized women’s teams who’ll be regulars on NHL Network during the summer-edition Women’s Worlds. Smile Japan is a whopping (+7.5) goal underdog at Bovada Sportsbook for Thursday’s tournament debut face-off against the United States, a handicap that also overlooks what’s likely to be Team USA’s defensive-oriented mindset coming into 2022’s WWC round-robin.

Yankee skaters will talk a good game about “staying aggressive” and remaining unafraid of Group A in spite of the team’s shaky performances in China. But in the big picture, the last thing that recently-signed HC John Wroblewski wants is for a so-called “weak sister” of the Worlds dinging the USA for 2 or 3 goals right away. Wroblewski knows the enthusiasic Smile Japan is capable of doing just that even if it’s in a losing cause, and more important than Group Stage style-points is the task of getting U.S. goalies back into a comfort zone.

If nothing else, WWC speculators should consider picking the low-side of Bovada’s (8.5) total-goals line for the USA vs Japan opener, since not only could the Japanese lose in a 9-2 or 8-1 laugher and still cover ATS, but a 7-0 or 8-0 win in which the U.S. lets up on the throttle late would still produce an “under” score.

Finland is a better (+1400) moneyline pick to surprise a potentially cocky Team Canada on Thursday than the Finns ever would be as a 14-to-1 gold-medal gambit, that is when without the services of Noora.

In Group B’s opening games on Friday afternoon, look for Hungary (+2.5) to hang “unexpectedly” close to Czechia, an often slow-starting women’s team whose tendencies are overlooked by distracted Sin City forecasters.