Austria’s win at the 2020 D1A World Junior Championships was an incredible upset, a feat of great teamwork, and one of the most exciting developments in Austrian hockey in at least the past 5 years. Now, Austria is slated to participate in the 2021 WJC in Red Deer and Edmonton. As the 2020-21 hockey season dawns, here are some storylines to follow leading up to the World Junior Championship.
The Graduates
Four years ago I predicted that the 2020 class would be the class to bring back Austrian hockey. It took them until the final tournament of their junior careers to do so. However, when all hope seemed to have been lost, they finally lived up to the potential they had shown so many years before and brought home Gold for Austria. They will be sorely missed. Benjamin Baumgartner and Paul Huber on the top line carried the Championship team offensively. Julian Payr and David Maier played heavy minutes on the defensive end. And forwards like Maximilian Rebernig, Paul Schmid, and Benjamin Lanzinger put forth solid defensive performances that kept Austria in games until the first line would come around to provide the scoring. Now they will transition their careers to the next level, with Baumgartner and Payr in the Swiss NLA, while the others make their ways into the Austrian IceHL, and Schmid crosses the pond to lead an NAHL team. Their absences will weaken the team, and the lack of depth in the 02′ group, in conjunction with an unexceptional 03′ group, will likely mean that this year’s team will not exceed, and perhaps not even match, the excellence for the former year’s squad. However, this year’s team deserves a good bit of discussion on its own as well.
The Composition
If available, the first line center would indisputably be Marco Rossi. Rossi is an elite talent and is projected to go very high in the 2020 NHL Draft. He will be replacing Benjamin Baumgartner, who played for HC Davos in the Swiss NLA last season. Rossi is, in all likelihood, a better player than Baumgartner. However, Baumgartner was a highly-prolific scorer in one of the top men’s hockey leagues in the world last year, which is to say that, while Rossi may be better on balance, the margin will not be so drastic as to ensure a superior team. On the right will be Senna Peeters, returning from last year’s squad. Senna put in an excellent performance in last year’s tournament. However, the leaders of the line were certainly the two 19-year olds, while Senna brought significant and highly-important contributions to the line in his role. He will have to play a much larger role this season. He and Rossi will likely log heavy minutes in each game, and even larger minutes in the games where Austria would hope to be competitive (against the Czech Republic, or in potential relegation matches). They will be relied upon to supply the vast majority of Austria’s offensive output. Both are great prospects who are both expected to be taken in the 2020 NHL draft. However, they will have tremendous roles to fill, and Senna in particular will have to take significant strides to compensate for the gap in physicality that will be left in the absence of a winger like Paul Huber. I would have to imagine that the top-line left-winger filling in for Huber would be Tim Harnisch. Harnisch is a good player but is not as good as Huber by a very long shot. He has none of Huber’s physical dominance, and what he excels at relative to Huber, solo playmaking, he does not excel at enough to have an equivalent impact against the top junior defensemen in the world. In 5 EBEL appearances in the 2019-20 season he did not register a single point or even a shot on goal, recording only a -1 goal balance. There will be points during the tournament where his offensive prowess will kick in to create chances. However, the top line will be carried by the duo of Rossi and Peeters, and anything Harnisch can contribute will be a bonus.
The top defensive pairing will likely be Luis Lindner and Thimo Nickl. And if they logged less than 25 minutes in any given game I would be rather surprised. Lindner is a converted forward. He is very offensively gifted from the blue line but his defense needs sore improvement. Nickl is the defensive star of the team. He will be relied upon heavily for every situation, even strength, powerplay, and penalty kill. Even with two very capable defensemen in David Maier and Julian Payr, Nickl already played extremely heavy minutes. The team will recoup Kilian Zundel, who missed the 2020 tournament with an injury. Zundel is an exceptional defenseman, perhaps even defensively equivalent to Maier and Payr but has not traditionally been the offensive threat that the two have been. Even if Zundel were to adequately replace one of them, he would be unable to replace both of them, which only means even fewer individuals for Nickl to share responsibilities with. The next defenseman in the rotation will probably be Jacob Pfeffer. Pfeffer can generously be described as a defensive specialist, he has 4 points in almost 50 SuperElit J20 games, but has struggled even in that arena at times and against far inferior competition than the Czech, the Americans, the Swedes and the Russians are expected to bring. Zundel can play on the left, so an alternative arrangement would be to have Zundel and Nickl log heavy minutes, place the offensive Lindner with the defensive Pfeffer and simply lean more heavily on the top line in terms of ice time. Timo Pallierer and Martin Urbanek would be the next defensemen in the rotation. They are both undersized, and both more offensively-oriented defensemen. However, neither recorded a point in the D1A tournament the year prior. Urbanek also did not score in 21 EBEL games or 2 AlpsHL games, and Pallierer scored 4 points in 32 AlpsHL games. Pallierer is a bit older, and likely the better of the two. However, they will have to show qualities they haven’t shown to this point to prevent the coach from shortening the bench in critical games. Rumblings have also been heard that Philipp Wimmer has upped his game. Wimmer has always been talented but has struggled to put the pieces together. If he made significant strides in the off-season it would be big news for Austria, but the strides would have to be significant.
Other forwards include Drummondville’s Fabian Hochegger, Sodertalje’s Leon Wallner, and Mora’s Lucas Thaler. Hochegger missed the 2019-20 tournament with an injury so his return will be welcome. Hochegger is a solid player, putting up 19 points in the QMJHL last season, and is arguably better than last year’s right-winger Benjamin Lanzinger. I wouldn’t overstate the upgrade, however, and Hochegger will be expected to lead the line, while Rebernig and Harnisch put in more substantial performances in the last tournament. Leon Wallner scored 22 points in 35 games for Sodertalje in the SuperElit J20 league last season. The performance was good enough to land him a position in the Central Scouting Midterm Rankings. Wallner is a former teammate of last year’s 2nd line center, Tim Harnisch. He doesn’t have Harnisch’s athleticism, but he is a much better system player and passer. Lucas Thaler is solid at center or on the right wing. He scored 12 points in 22 games for Mora IK in the SuperElit J20 league last season. He and Wallner were the youngsters on the team last season, with Senna. The two lag behind his offensive capabilities, but they have ample room and time for improvement, and much can change in a year for junior players. Austrian fans will certainly be watching these two to see how much they will improve from last year to this year. Oskar Maier is the best junior forward in the Austrian junior system. He’s a fast skater who plays a high pace game. He gets to the puck quite quickly, and has been improving at doing good things with it once he gets to it. From the Red Bull Academy that produced talents such as Paul Huber, Tim Harnisch, Senna Peeters and Leon Wallner, however, he is not considered exceptional. Another forward I would watch for is Linz’s Kilian Fruhwirt. Fruhwirt is a very tough kid and a hard worker, ideally suited for a bottom-6 role.
In net, Sebastian Wraneschitz has stood between the pipes against relatively strong competition in the top Finnish and Swedish junior leagues, as well as the AlpsHL, but the results have been mixed at best. His familiarity with strong levels of competition brings some comfort. But he will have to translate that experience into marked improvement prior to the WJC to have any chance of holding his own in between the pipes against the goaltenders that opposing teams will field. Felix Beck from Vorarlberg might also be an option. Across the pond, Thomas Schubert has done respectably, but he will be expected to, at the very least, play in a junior league to even be considered.
The Youngsters and the Unknown
There is one Senna Peeters-esque situation going on for Austria this fall. However, one can never predict the speed of the consular office, nor is the player in question of the caliber of Peeters, though he would certainly be a welcome addition.
Then there are the youngsters. The 01′ and 02′ classes are legitimately not very deep. The talents at the top are exception, especially the 01′ class, but there is a significant drop-off, and the 02′ class is far weaker, really only saved by the late addition of Senna Peeters. The 03′ class is the 02′ class minus Peeters. It is not a strong class. The 04′ class looks more promising at the moment, but a lot of that is skewed by the presence of Marco Kasper. Marco Kasper is the son of Pete Kasper, an agent for USM hockey. He is the second Marco to be a promising Austrian prospect whose father works for USM, as Michael Rossi, Marco Rossi’s father, is a scout for the aforementioned company. Both fathers were defensemen but both of their sons are forwards. Kasper is incredibly talented. When his time comes, he could go as high as Rossi in the NHL draft. However, he is 16, and will be playing against the top 19 year-olds in the world. Austria’s lack of forward depth ensures that he will make the team. Expectations shouldn’t be too high, a 17-year old Alexis Lafreniere’s performance in the world juniors was considered a massive dud, and Kasper will be a year younger than Lafreniere. Kasper is unquestionably the future. But his impact in this specific tournament may be rather muted, and that is fine. A couple members of the 03′ crop should also make the roster. Max Theirich is extremely small but extremely athletic. If he develops well he could push some of the 02s, perhaps Thaler and Maier. Finn Van Ee is another forward who might make the team from the burgeoning KAC junior program. He has a very good all-around game. If he had one defining trait, in addition to his well-rounded game, like blazing speed, uncontestable strength, or eyes in the back of his head then he might have crossed the pond already. Then there is the defenseman Christoph Tialler. He made headlines for a day being allowed to train with the IceHL squad in Klagenfurt. He’s quite talented as a puck-moving defenseman, but like most other Austrian prospects, lacks size, and strength, and snarl, and his puck-moving skills while excellent by Austrian standards are still under-developed compared to elite youth of the same age in other countries. Austrian juniors are notorious for being late bloomers, so there is no concern that these players will not develop into great players. However, it would probably be overly optimistic to predict inordinate amounts of success for them in the upcoming tournament.
The Prediction
The beauty of the storylines is far more important to me than the result of the tournament. Marco Rossi, for so many years let down by older junior teams, will finally get his WJC. Senna Peeters making the call to play for Austria, and in his first tournament in an Austrian jersey that decision paying off for him in the form of securing a World Juniors for himself, an opportunity he was unlikely to have had if he hadn’t made the call. A chance for the world to get its first viewing of Marco Kasper, and a chance for the 03′ class to at least make their cases before scouts. The final hurrah of the 00′ class. Simply being in the tournament will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for everyone on the squad. Something that these kids have been dreaming about for years. That’s wonderful.
The result of the tournament will likely not be spectacular. Avoiding relegation would be a bigger miracle than last year’s promotion. Germany, for a time a relatively equal rival, is now producing prospects at a rate that Austria doesn’t have a prayer of matching, including 3 potential first rounders in this year’s NHL draft, which would represent Germany’s 3rd straight year with a first-rounder. And relegation is a 3 game series, so the craziness and puck-luck that might transpire in a single game would be insufficient. The Czechs will not be easier to beat. What they lack in top-end talent in comparison with Germany they easily make up for in depth. If Germany defeated Slovakia, then Austria would face a team without Germany’s elite top-end talent but without the Czech Republic’s depth. And even then, predicting a win against the Slovaks would be optimistic at the very least. Marco Rossi will put forth a valiant performance. But he alone cannot carry this team to victory. The team, at its core, has 3 elite players, 2 forwards and one defenseman. Almost enough for a full line, and almost enough for a full defensive pairing, but not quite enough for either. Ultimately, the team will do its best. A miracle, while unlikely, would certainly be thrilling. And anything can happen. So there is no reason not to hope for the best, and live in the moment.
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