Tre Kronor are hardly favourites to enter the Ice Hockey World Championship in Switzerland. After recent strong performances at the World Championship and the Olympics, the national team enters this tournament with a mix of youth and experience.
Five super talents from the junior national team that won gold in Minnesota in early January have been mixed with players who have experience of World Championship and Stanley Cup victories.
Sam Hallam's final championship campaign begins this afternoon against a star-studded and heavily favored Canada.
It will be the first match.
Heavy Olympic blow
The gold talk has been toned down a bit, although hopes are still high. But Canada are also Hallam's favourites.
Canada almost always come in as the favourites, and rightly so. They have a very strong player pool and often a very good team. But matches are not won on paper but in close combat, by keeping a cool head in the right situations and through good goaltending, says Hallam, who will join Swiss club Genève-Servette next season.
The Olympic blow in Milan took a toll on the national team captain. A poor group stage and a quarterfinal loss to Olympic gold medallist USA extinguished the team's gold dreams and were tough to take.
Hallam says he sought counselling to get over the criticism and backlash.
I used the first week to call people I've worked with and played with before, friends, to get an honest picture. My way of dealing with it was that I needed to talk, listen, say things out loud. I also took talk therapy and have been doing that since 2017. It's a way of developing yourself, he says.
“It’s hard to fail”
We are all different, but I think most people recognise that it is hard to fail, to get help with it and to accept it without blaming everyone else - without looking in the mirror and questioning what I could have done differently and better.
Now he and the team are chasing the right feeling in the World Championship.
What happened during and after the Olympics made me step back a little and return to some core values of why we do this. Because we love competing and working as a team, I really want to get that back out.
We're going to get everything out of it, build a feeling of joy and pride in playing and find the drive to be able to win something.
Facts: Sam Hallam's results
World Cup 2023: 6.
World Cup 2024: Bronze.
Four Nations 2025: 3.
World Cup 2025: Bronze.
Olympics 2026: 7.
