Shane Wright admits Team Canada didn't respect their opponent enough after embarrassing loss

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Josh tupper
December 27, 2022 (9:35)

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Team Canada opened their World Juniors yesterday against Team Czechia. The Canadians entered the game as heavy favourites to not only win the game but the tournament as well. But after some early showboating, their inability to make a simple pass caught up to them.

Canada ultimately fell to the Czechia Team 5-2 on home soil. The embarrassing loss was highlighted by multiple attempts by Canadian players to perform "The Michigan" and a lack of execution execution caught up to the team.

After the game Shane Wright, the Captain of the team spoke out about his team's disappointing performance.

We're disappointed. We didn't play up to our standards that we know we can. They came out hard and they played us well. They're the better team tonight. They deserve to win... We know it's not good enough, we know that we've got to bounce back. We got to do a lot of things better, and it's going to be a big learning opportunity for us. Definitely going to teach us a lot of adversity here. I think just overall: disappointing. But we've got to learn from this, got to move on from it.

The gold medal is not won tonight. We still got three more round robin games to go. And I think tonight's just going to teach us a lot of a good lessons. We've got to respect our opponent a little more. We've got to make sure that we come in every single game ready to fight. We're going to get every team's best and every team wants to beat Canada.

Wright is one of the few players in the tournament with NHL experience and more needs to be expected from him. If he can't deliver the tournament will be a short one for Team Canada.