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2012 World Hockey Championship will have a new look
Greg Smith
OurHometown.ca
This year the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) has introduced a new format for the World Hockey Championship. Previous versions had teams split into four groups, with the top three teams in each group qualifying for the second round. This year they decided to place the sixteen teams into two preliminary groups.
Ottawa - April 28, 2012 - This year the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) has introduced a new format for the World Hockey Championship. Previous versions of the tournament had teams split into four groups of four teams each, with the top three teams in each group qualifying for the second round. The IIHF decided to place the 16 teams in two preliminary round groups with each teams in each division. Teams were seeded based on their IIHF world ranking.
This means that Canada will play seven preliminary round games, starting with their opening game against Slovakia on Friday, May 4th in Helsinki, Finland. Team Canada will then follow that up with a game against the U.S.A. on Saturday. The other five teams in Canada’s group includes France, Switzerland, Finland, Kazakstan and Belarus with the biggest game coming against the hosts, Finland on Friday, May 11th in Helsinki.
The top four teams in each preliminary round group will advance to the quarterfinals. The change to the new format now makes every preliminary round game even more important because how well you do determines your seeding in the quarter-finals if you qualify. The teams who place 5-8 will no longer play any meaningless seeding games and the last place team in each group will be relegated to Division I.
The quarterfinals will be played within the groups before the teams will cross-over for the semi-finals which will be played in Helsinki, Finland. The medal games will also be in Helsinki. For the top four teams in the tournament a total of 10 games will be played.
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