Going into this year’s World Juniors, the Minnesota Wild must have felt hopeful to come out of it with a higher reputation of their prospect pool than going in. With a couple of Russian forwards in Marat Khusnutdinov and Vladislav Firstov, an Austrian phenom in Marco Rossi, a top-line Czech in Pavel Novak and the American savior Matt Boldy, we can just feel the potential blooming.
Now, after every team has played at least one match in the group stage, we can get a little bit of a clearer picture of how these players will do at this tenuous teenage tournament.